I'd been on everybody else's show and there was always a preinterview. Somebody would come with a tape recorder and you'd talk for three or four hours, and they'd take it back and it would be transcribed, and it would be given to the writers, those many writers you see on all those shows, Larry King, Letterman, Leno, etc. And then they choose the answers that will be most evocative on their show.

Olivier was another case of a genius, who couldn't understand why anybody would have any trouble doing this, because for him it came so easily.

I'd been on all the television programs as an actor, as a writer, as a director, as a producer.

They change. They're different. There are no two alike, that's the miracle of it. But if they have something to teach the students. You can see them writing during the show.

I stopped writing at the age of 18. I had written incessantly before that. I read, of course, because I was in university, but I wasn't going to write. I wasn't going to do any of those dangerous things. I was going to be a stolid, bourgeois lawyer.

There's only one man I've called a coward, and that's Brian Doyle-Murray.

I love writing. I like reading, other people, not myself.