Jim Henson on Puppetry

“One of the nice things about puppets is that it's your own hand in there. You can make it do anything you want it to.”

“It was interesting and kind of fun to do--but I wasn't really interested in puppetry then. It was just a means to an end.”

“And so that he can tell what’s happening, a puppeteer always watches his performance in a television monitor. In a way, the puppeteer becomes an audience to his own performance.”

“I feel that almost everyone maintains a childlike quality throughout their adulthood. One of the nice things about the puppet form is that it has the ability to communicate with this childlike side of the audience.”

“Working as I do with movement of puppet creatures, I'm always struck by the feebleness of our efforts to achieve naturalistic movement. Just looking at the incredible movement of a lizard or a bird, or even the smallest insect, can be a very humbling experience.”

“A lot of people build very stiff puppets--you can barely move the thing--and you can get very little expression out of a character that you can barely move. Your hand has a lot of flexibility to it, and what you want to do is to build a puppet that can reflect all that flexibility.”