I looked at enough of American Idol in the first weeks, and they're all about humiliation. I listen to Rush Limbaugh because I find it so repulsive. There are people with a little less sophistication who watch a lot of it, because we allow things to appeal to our baser instincts. But at the same moment, give me a little choice, and I'll make a better decision, because I have that ability too. And so does everybody else.

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.

Granted, the writers, directors, producers, and that community make a great deal of money. But they might be choosing to do a whole lot of other things for the living they make.

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.

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 was writing for live television. And I said to myself, someday, soon as I can, I have got to do a situation comedy.

We got ratings. It isn't that they won't quarrel with you, or say you're always right. But as long as you stay strong and the ratings are good and you're reasonable - I don't think we fought unreasonably. We basically won that right.