I was never ambitious. I just wanted to have quiet, calm, listen to public radio and say, hello, how are you? Sit down, rest. But I had an early partner named Fred Freeman, a wonderful writer who I met at Northwestern. And I thought we were doing very well with "Jack Paar," and he said, no, we got to go to Hollywood. We got to write sitcom. It's the coming thing.

I directed fourteen movies. Every movie had Hector Elizondo. He didn't like Beaches. I don't know, it was originally not a happy movie at all, it was much sadder than that. And they brought me in to kind of make it a little more 'warm', I guess you might call it. The original ending was a whole messy thing.

I wrote three years for Lucille Ball. She taught me everything I know about physical comedy...

Never underestimate the power of your sister.

Now women are rising to great positions and they run most of the studios now.

For Joey Bishop, always was kind of the lost soul, so I did a traffic joke.

I don't know about immortal, but I must say that to me to touch more women and to have them understand friendships is important. I've had girls come up to me who said, "Yeah, after I saw 'Beaches' I called up my friend Denise who I was really mad at. She got me so aggravated and I called her and we made up." So if I could do that with this new release, yes, that would be very pleasing to me because, hey, it's a tough world. You need friends out there.