Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

“A child’s use of imagination and fantasy blends into his use of creativity,” Jim explained later. The trick, he said, was to “try out whole new directions. There are many ways of doing something. Look for what no one has tried before.” As he would demonstrate many times throughout his life, sometimes the cleverest solutions to a problem were also the simplest—and usually lying in plain sight, provided you could see a thing differently.

“He was always interested in getting beyond,” said Stone. “I think he saw his mind as a sort of prison. He was always kind of outside of it, trying things that the rest of us just … keep going with our blinders on, down our own little path, and he was out in the woods somewhere. He was great.”