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

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.

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.

Contentment is the greatest joy.

What do you believe reveals more about a man’s character, his arrogance or his attempt to disguise it?

Gracious Providence, to whom I owe all my powers, why didst thou not withhold some of those blessings I possess, and substitute in their place a feeling of self-confidence and contentment?

To even be called the 'teen queen' is crazy.

The [book of the bible] Song Of Songs is an amazing erotic love poem that the church has tried very hard not to notice. It is really beautiful, and musical in its poetry.

Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.

Those who wish to attain God and progress in religious devotion, should particularly guard themselves against the snares of lust and wealth. Otherwise they can never attain perfection.

That's one of the best things about characters like Indiana Jones. I mean, he's funny. He's done really wicked things.

I was skydiving horizontally.

What you think about expands. If your thoughts are centered on what's missing, then what's missing, by definition, will have to expand.