Life is made up of small pleasures. Happiness is made up of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. And if you don't collect all these tiny successes, the big ones don't really mean anything.

I guess because the shows were activist in their own way - the marriage of my public activism and my career activism, you know - people understand me very well. They also understand there's a very strong bipartisan part in all of this.

We all [Ed Simmons,Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis] started together, so there were no rules - anything we wrote became television.

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.

Ed Simmons and I became stars in the emerging medium of television. We were new and fresh, just like TV at the time, so we automatically became 'THE' comedy writers for television.

But it also became the experience, or was the experience, of the writers who were attracted to this kind of humor. They're all men or women who come from the same kind of experience in their own lives.

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.