Jim Henson

Jim Henson was an American puppeteer, film director and set designer famous for his work on Sesame Street and for creating The Muppets. He has been assessed by the admins of this site as INFP.

Quotes

 * "The most sophisticated people I know - inside they are all children."
 * "I wish everyone in the world could do what they want to do as much as I can."
 * I've never felt any sense of competition with anybody, and we're all friends; we're all good friends."
 * "I still like very much the abstract characters and some of those abstract characters I still feel are slightly more pure. If you take a character and you call him a frog, or like Rowlf, our dog, call him a dog, you immediately give the audience a handle. You're assisting the audience to understand; you're giving them a bridge or an access. And if you don't give them that, if you keep it more abstract, it's almost more pure. It's a cooler thing. It's a difference of sort of warmth and cool."
 * [On his character Kermit the Frog;] "...he's always been a part of my personality, really."
 * "...the personality of the puppet has got to have an affinity with the personality of the puppeteer. And then when it works well, then the puppeteer slowly adds more and more things to the character of the puppet."
 * "...once we shot Nureyev, Elton John and Judy Collins in three consecutive shows. It was fascinating to me, jumping style so completely from show to show."
 * Frank Oz: "He didn’t lead, he just was himself."
 * Frank Oz: "He would go down to the workshop and slap everybody’s back and loved talking to them, and loved talking to the writers."
 * James Collins: "The beauty of the Muppets, on both Sesame Street and their own show, was that they were cuddly but not too cuddly, and not only cuddly. There are satire and sly wit; Bert and Ernie quarrel; Miss Piggy behaves unbecomingly; Kermit is sometimes exasperated. By adding just enough tartness to a sweet overall spirit, Henson purveyed a kind of innocence that was plausible for the modern imagination. His knowingness allowed us to accept his real gifts: wonder, delight, optimism."
 * James Collins: "Through his work, he helped sustain the qualities of fancifulness, warmth and consideration that have been so threatened by our coarse, cynical age."