I think if you're feeling great about where you are, everything that led up to it had to be terrific.

In the area we're discussing, leadership begins on Madison Avenue, on the desks and in the offices of people who spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying what will get them ratings.

That's the heart of it: My shows were not that controversial with the American people. They were controversial with the people who think for the American people.

I get a kick out of the fact that people will pick on the writers in California for being responsible for the content. The people seriously responsible for the content are the people who buy it.

Life is about having a good time, and it was a good time. We did some things well and some things poorly, but that was always the case.

I think somehow I got a sense of the foolishness of the human - my favorite phrase, the foolishness of the human condition.

So we gravitated to shows and issues and causes that made people care.