The American people may not be the best-educated, but they’re very wise at heart.

Prison make you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.

I try to just communicate what I want done as clearly and simply as possible.

Unless the story line carries the scenes, the scenes don’t really mean anything.

I already had one of the best jobs in British policing, so it was always going to have to be something really outstanding to tempt me away.

The best revenge in the world is success.

T.V. has to be edited and scored and everything else, and if you don’t like what you’re watching it can be a very painful process.

I wanted to just do a one-act play for 26 minutes, with commercials at the beginning and end. For years, I couldn’t get my way. They wanted to interrupt three times.

Anytime you have somebody doing positive stuff and just doing their time and minding their own business, people will sit up there and lie.

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

TIVO executives stand up and say, ‘Well, we’re not getting rid of commercials, but we are letting them fast forward, because people like commercials, and if they see one that they like they stop and...

The trafficking of sex and violence is comes after the demand for ratings.

There is a difference between me and most, which is that I am fresh off the block. I don’t look for no special privileges. I’m a man who paid my does.

I was raised not to be rude, but I also try to get the best work out of people.

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...

I felt that if we, as the Met, were not intervening once one person starts digging up Parliament Square, then someone else is going to join in and you have a spiral.

You got good and bad people everywhere.

The agendas on the management side of the table now are not in sync like they used to be because you have vastly different entities supplying programming to networks.

In the area we’re discussing, leadership begins on Madison Avenue, on the desks and in the offices of people who spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying what will get them ratings.

If I stay in here until I am 100 years olds, I will still be a man.

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

Material farmed out for comments to interested agencies and people meant they would be in touch later.

TV that people will never see, that giant international corporations will never touch, will never pay your salary.

As far as anybody in the rap game ever tryin’ to assassinate my character, that’s impossible. You talkin’ about a man who has always walked the walk and talked the talk.

I was running Miami Vice, but it wasn’t my show so I got to learn an enormous amount. You were basically getting trained to have your own show.

Maybe they continued to agree with Archie Bunker – as I said earlier, you can’t change people’s minds, but you can get them to think.

I have always advised people never to apply for a job you do not really want.

I am in the penitentiary. The only thing that I do is my time.

The environment doesn’t change that radically. You are still going to go home at night and NBC is going to be there, ABC and CBS will still be there.

In this nation, leadership is dollars.

If you always been my enemy, it’s still that way.

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

Advertising is the art of the tiny. You have to tell a complete a story and deliver a complete message in a very encapsulated form. It disciplines you to cut away extraneous information.

Well, television has become an unforgiving environment and you don’t get to make mistakes. That was the great thing about Universal in the old days.

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

Basically, people are never happy enough because they want more money.

I would say that if you really wished to be a working member of the community, don’t go out on strike because then there’s no work and no potential of work.

At great, great remove sit the head of General Electric, the head of News Corp, the head of Viacom, or the head of this giant international corporation that wants these ratings.

We took an approach, supported by the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary and the Mayor for London, that we had very real fears of violence and damage being caused across the streets of London.

Pac always praised Death Row. Nobody ever leaves here alive. I lost a lot of loved ones like him. If you around me, then I have your back.

The great strikes of the ’50s and ’60s were bloody and awful, but at that point there were only three networks. Everyone came back to work.

It crossed our minds early on that the more an audience cared – we were working before, on average, 240, live people. If you could get them caring – the more they cared, the harder...

If you wanna cross somebody, then do that. Don’t act like it wasn’t you.

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

And the consumer doesn’t care. They don’t watch networks, they watch TV shows.

When it went on the air, the sales department hated it. It was the highest advertising pullout show in the history of NBC. At the early focus groups, people were saying, ‘Who are these people?...

We did an episode on Good Times which came out of a newspaper article about the incidence of hypertension in black males being higher than whites, and increasing. So we did a show in which...

How could you be from the ghetto and be a rat?

If the scripts are not good, I’ll tell somebody, ‘This isn’t good.’

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...