Virtual reality's been around for 40 years. People have been talking about storytelling in that world for all these years, and there have been experiments around of people trying to do that, and always excited about it.

When I was young, it was television that was taking off, and so you had people worried that people were spending too much time watching television.

The Pixar name means more than any other name. It's very important to us to keep that name at a high level.

I did like 'Despicable Me.' I thought it was quite good.

I liked the first 'Kung Fu Panda.'

I worked closely with Steve Jobs for twenty-six years. To this day, for all that has been written about him, I don't believe that any of it comes close to capturing the man I knew.

Sometimes a leap of faith doesn't pan out.

Programmers are very creative people. And animators are problem solvers, just as programmers are.

As I look back on my career, I had a goal, which was to build the first feature computer-animated film.

If you're a director presenting a new idea, and the person who can judge whether or not it goes ahead is in the room, that makes you somewhat defensive.

One term that's used in this industry a lot is this notion of 'feeding the beast.' You've got all of these people whose livelihoods are dependent on it. There are enormous pressures to keep material going into it, and the pressures to feed it are not irrational. They're the basis of your business.

When companies are successful or not successful, they almost immediately jump to the wrong conclusions about how they got there or why they got there.

At heart, we believe that the films that work well are the films that do touch people emotionally.

When I see a film, I'll remember that there was a time when it wasn't working, and there was some pain and angst in order to get it to work.

I can't look at 'WALL-E' or 'Finding Nemo' or 'Up' and look at in the same way as people outside of the company would look at it. Each one of them had angst.

The need to challenge the status quo is just more obvious when you're failing than when you're succeeding. But it's no less urgent.

Creative ideas aren't like Jenga blocks, where they fall apart and you've got to start from scratch, though it can feel that way.

We need to remember we're always a lot more wrong than we think.

One of Pixar's key mechanisms is the Braintrust, which we rely on to push us toward excellence and to root out mediocrity. It is our primary delivery system for straight talk.

The Braintrust developed organically out of the rare working relationship among the five men who led and edited the production of 'Toy Story' - John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, Lee Unkrich, and Joe Ranft.

I apply the term 'creativity' broadly... it's problem solving. We are all faced with problems, and we have to address them and think of something new, and that's where creativity comes in.

Communication needs to be between anybody at any time, which means it needs to happen out of the structure and out of order.

I've really thought a lot about why other companies fail or succeed. I had to be a student of failure and find out why things went off the rails. I did that at a fairly deep level, and it's still something I do.

The desire to avoid meltdowns actually is one of the things that screws up live-action films.

It doesn't even matter how successful a movie like 'Up' is: you'll never sell a lot of toy walkers. But that's the way we spread out the risk.

My best advice came by examples. A supportive environment at home, school, and grad school. Support at the New York Institute of Technology, then George Lucas, Steve Jobs, and Bob Iger. The examples meant that I should support other people, even when things aren't going well. It will pay off.

I've always been surprised at the number of people who think we've got it all figured out. It's incorrect, and it's a real problem.

I use a progressive alarm that makes a soft sound at first and then progressively gets louder. But I usually wake on the first sound, so it doesn't disturb my wife. When I used a loud alarm clock, I was more likely to hit it on the head and go back to sleep.

I have received a great deal of benefit from the simple yet difficult practice of learning to stop the internal voice in my head. I learned that the voice isn't me, and I don't need to keep rethinking events of the past nor overthink plans for the future. This skill has helped me both to focus and to pause before responding to unexpected events.

I exercise in the gym about three times a week. I vary the workout every time, but I'll always do some type of circuit work with weights. It gets my heart rate up without putting too much stress on my knees, which for some reason seem to be older than the rest of my body.

I eagerly await the day when there is a replacement for the meniscus.

While problems in a film are fairly easy to identify, the sources of those problems are often extraordinarily difficult to assess. A mystifying plot twist or a less-than-credible change of heart in our main character is often caused by subtle underlying issues elsewhere in the story.

Beware of being blinded by your own success.

One of the effects Pixar University has on the culture is that it makes people less self-conscious about their work and gets them comfortable with being publicly reviewed.

If you want people to be let loose, you can't over-control them.

When you take a director off a project, that makes a person feel humiliated because everyone knows it. But we're responsible because we put them in that position.

What I've learned running Pixar applies to all businesses.

For me, the work we did to turn around 'Toy Story 2' was the defining moment in Pixar's history.

People say they want to be in risky environments and do all kinds of exciting stuff. But they don't actually know what risk means: that risk actually does bring failure and mistakes.

Part of being the successful Pixar is that we will take risks on teams and ideas, and some of them won't work out. We only lose from this if we don't respond to the failures. If we respond, and we think it through and figure out how to move ahead, then we're learning from it. That's what Pixar is.

Every new idea in any field needs protection.

With certain ideas, you can predict commercial success. So with a 'Toy Story 3' or a 'Cars 2,' you know the idea is more likely to have financial success. But if you go down that path too far, you become creatively bankrupt because you're just trying to repeat yourself.