Film provides an opportunity to marry the power of ideas with the power of images.

Casting is sort of like looking at paintings. You don't know what you'll like, but you recognize it when you see it.

Being a good television screenwriter requires an understanding of the way film accelerates the communication of words.

Hill Street Blues might have been the first television show that had a memory. One episode after another was part of a cumulative experience shared by the audience.

Vivid images are like a beautiful melody that speaks to you on an emotional level. It bypasses your logic centers and even your intellect and goes to a different part of the brain.

When it is perceived that a show has gone awry, the pressure is staggering, and as a writer caught in that storm, it feels like you are being attacked by jackals.

Hill Street Blues gave me an opportunity to work with an ensemble cast of people whose work I admired.

You have to give directors and cinematographers a word blueprint for visuals, but I had to learn that from experience.

If bad taste were a felony, every writer I know would've done prison time.

I think the best work flows out of a collaborative environment.

Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience.

Greed is like a dark side of every man, and you could not see it from the appearance of a man, but in the inside the greedy beast already dominating you.

It's our very capacity for self-consciousness that makes us self-destructive!

I'm not the first person to say this, but communication at 'SNL' - I don't want to say it's not good, but unless you ask questions, you will not know what's going on.

Cereal when high is always a great option. I don't even have cereal for that reason.

Enemies were teachers in disguise.

I guess this year I'm going to find out if I'm good enough or not. If I'm not, I don't care. I'll do something else, it's not a biggie.

Life is real, and death is the illusion.

The less help you have in a garden the more yours it is.

The only thing that ever consoles man for the stupid things he does is the praise he always gives himself for doing them.

Tell me what you are doing with your suffering, and I will tell you who you are.