We can't compete with Mel Gibson, but we figured we could do our part.

People always say, well, how do you get through show business? How do you swim the waters? And how do you survive and all that? I had a very solid method, and that is team up with ambitious partners.

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.

I played a lot of ball and got hurt, stitches and this and that. That, sometimes they said, built character. I don't think it built anything.

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 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 think a lot of creative people have no sense of numbers and economics.