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.

The Gong Show provided me with five years of the happiest times of my life, but that's that. And to be known as the guy who gave the world The Gong Show - listen, my Uncle George isn't known as anything. So I guess it isn't so bad in that context.

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.

One piece of pie is delicious. Fourteen pieces are obviously nauseating.

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.

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.

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