I guess the story that best defines us [with Bud Yorkin] and our relationship goes back to the [Dean] Martin and [Jerry] Lewis show. The four stage managers on that show became major TV creators and directors - John Rich, Jack Smight, Arthur Penn and Bud Yorkin.

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

I wish I knew how we achieve the goal of world peace. My bumper sticker reads 'Just Another Version of You.' The sooner we agree that we're just other versions of each other - we human beings - the sooner we will find some sense of world peace.

That's a very hard thing to help the establishment know. We're still an establishment that thinks the average mentality is something like 13 years of age, that never forgot H.L. Mencken's notion that nobody lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American people. That's the horseshit the establishment has always lived with.

I think somehow I got a sense of the foolishness of the human - my favorite phrase, the foolishness of the human condition.

We are a country of excess. So it's not the violence, per se, but the exacerbation and constant repetition.

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