In football you can make it if you've got the 'I'm-going-to-get-up-off-the-ground-and-kick-your-ass' attitude.

Friends come in herds and they leave in herds. Hollywood loves an adventure, but you have to hit bottom. Then they love to save you and be a part of it. Or think they're a part of it.

The best way not to fail again is to be absolutely positive that when you do it this time, you're going to do it right.

There are no awards in Hollywood for being an idiot.

But then when I'm in a halfway successful movie, it irritates the hell out of the critics in New York, because they'd like to kill my pictures if they could. So maybe I'm pretty good in the movie. Then they use all these words like I'm 'surprisingly' good, or 'shockingly enough,' I'm good. It's like I crawled out from under a magazine and they're surprised I can act.

Smokey and the Bandit was the first picture [Hal Needham ] directed, and I knew he could handle it. I had just directed Gator, and he saw my style and used that as a pattern.

In football you can make it if you've got the 'I'm-going-to-get-up-off-the-ground-and-kick-your-ass' attitude.