I really wasn't too interested in writing "Father Knows Best" and "Ozzie And Harriet." I thought they were pleasant enough, but it wasn't really what I wanted to do.

Women are pretty good. Women usually fight about some stupid guy and then when they figure out it's just a stupid guy they make up and move on.

If you’ve got the comedy eye, you can look at any situation and see the humor in it while others don’t.

I was crying when I was editing [Beacher] but I stopped all the screenings years ago because I had a headache but then I had seen it again... Well I always cry at the same place, when they play that song "Wind Beneath My Wings". It gets you.

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.

If you're creative, they let you be the showrunner, producer. The first thing my partner and I did as producers was hire ourselves as directors - because who else would hire me?

I wasn't really that good at being a musician. And then I tried being a standup. I was an actor. I was a photographer. I tried everything. Nothing was particularly working for me, but then, as a musician, I wrote jokes for comics. And they started to buy my jokes, and that's where I thought maybe that might work.