One of my thrills of the business is to find young people, there's a window. I like young people who are in that brief window between on their-way-up and rehab. In that window I can make stars. It's not really true but it's not so far off.

I always remember writing a page of jokes for a comedian and handing it to him backstage at a club and he read it and then took his cigarette lighter and lit the page 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 think a lot of creative people have no sense of numbers and economics.

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.

Editing is the only process. The shooting is the pleasant work. The editing makes the movie, so I spend all my life in editing

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.