The closest I came to doing anything that I wanted to do was to try and check and see what industries were just starting out. There was plastics and television, and I figured television had to be more fun than plastics.

I think if you're behind the times, you've failed. I think the only way to measure success is being right on time with what people want.

There's tons of creative people in television that have one failure after another, and they just step up higher. I could never get over that. When I had a failure, there was no such thing as just getting over it.

Helplessness is such a rotten feeling. There's nothing you can do about it. Being helpless is like being paralyzed. It's sickness. The cure calls for a monumental effort to stand up and start walking somewhere, anywhere. But that takes some doing.

I came up with a new game-show idea recently. It's called The Old Game. You got three old guys with loaded guns onstage. They look back at their lives, see who they were, what they accomplished, how close they came to realizing their dreams. The winner is the one who doesn't blow his brains out. He gets a refrigerator.

Fifty percent of something is better than than one hundred percent of nothing.

I went out and started on my way up in television. I wrote music, I wrote books, I played an instrument half-ass. I would always have liked to play in a band. I would always have liked to be a substantial writer, to write country music for big singers. I had all sorts of proclivities, but I never had any big success.