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

I think what's dangerous is 24 hours a day, 335 channels, or whatever the hell there is. Too much is too much.

The American people may not be the best-educated, but they're very wise at heart.

America is a country of excess.

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.

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.

We had two African American writers [Eric Monte and Michael Evans] on the show ['Good Times'] that knew Cabrini Green inside and out, and that's why we set it there.