We had a Judeo-Christian ethic hanging around a couple thousand years that didn't help erase racism at all. So the notion of the little half-hour comedy changing things is something I think is silly.

I think for television generally, the question that often arises is, "Does television lead, or does it follow?" You know, does it lead the conversation, or culture, or does it follow what's going on? And I think it does both.

I like getting up in the morning, and I like better having something to do when I get up in the morning.

As a matter of fact, when people ask where my 'point of view' comes from, it was there in one of the first sketches we wrote for [Dean] Martin and [Jerry] Lewis.

Success is how you collect your minutes. You spend millions of minutes to reach one triumph, one moment, then you spend maybe a thousand minutes enjoying it. If you were unhappy through those millions of minutes, what good is the thousand minutes of triumph? It doesn't equate... Life is made of small pleasures. Good eye contact over the breakfast table with your wife. A moment of touching a friend. Happiness is made of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. If you don't have all those zillions of tiny successes, the big ones don't mean anything.

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

Culturally, I think 'All in the Family' was universal enough to have good timing at any time.