'All in the Family' took ten weeks to take off in 1971, and we were lucky to start in January, because if it had started in the regular fall season of 1970, I don't know if we would have lasted. The ratings didn't take off until the end of that fall season, when the other two networks ran out of fresh shows.

We just may be the most well-informed, yet least self-aware, people in history.

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.

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.

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

My dad called me meat head dead from the neck up.

Ratings translate into corporations, corporations that need a profit statement this quarter that's larger than the last.