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

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

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

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.

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.

Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai découvert en moi un invincible été.

Color me....BRILLIANT.

One is healthy when one can laugh at the earnestness and zeal with which one has been hypnotized by any single detail of one's life.

But steel bars have never yet kept out a mob it takes something a good deal stronger: human courage backed up by the consciousness of being right.

I'm privileged to have followed Sir Matt because all you have to do is to try and maintain the standards that he set so many years ago.

A pill that the present moment is daily bread to thousands.

I may be the only person, the only presidential candidate who never carried the state in which he was born.

Musicians always come off sounding a little bit pretentious, and a little bit... I don't know, hypocritical, from what they do, talking about strong issues.

In 1993, 40 percent of Minnesota restaurateurs reported declines attributed to casinos

Why pray if we cannot change God? ...is that why we pray? To change omniscient Love? Isn't it rather to learn what it is and to fulfill it? Not to change it by our acts, but to change our acts by it.