Brian Grazer

“You should not do everything in your power to make reviewers cranky before - right before they see your movie.”

“Everybody in Hollywood has to beat the 'no' - and if you write code in Silicon Valley, or if you design cars in Detroit, if you manage hedge funds in Lower Manhattan, you also have to learn to beat the 'no.'”

“I like learning stuff. The more information you can get about a person or a subject, the more you can pour into a potential project. I made a decision to do different things. I want to do things that have a better chance of being thought of as original. I do everything I can to disrupt my comfort zone.”

“A producer is supposed to generate an idea for a movie. And then they're supposed to create the team, the group of people that are gonna make this movie. And within that team, the producer has to have a creative vision and a fiscal vision, and they have to adhere to both things.”

“Curiosity is the process of asking questions, genuine questions, that are not leading to an ask for something in return.”

“The hair is part of my image, part of my persona. And the hair is no accident: I have to gel it vertical every single morning.”

“I went to USC. I wasn't a rich kid or anything like that, so I had to get a scholarship. Went to USC; my first year, I took 26 units, so I got to have a nickname. Everyone goes, 'There's 26.' So I had a nickname. Having a nickname is a good thing because then you start to get popular, and you keep that going.”

“By having a little bit of knowledge about many different things, it enables me to talk to people about a subject that they would not ordinarily think I could talk about. It's a lever for me, I suppose.”

“You have to know the weeds - to have lived in them - to delegate. I wouldn't want to be a leader who had never lived in the weeds.”

“In Hollywood, people tend to have the same sensibilities, the same taste and values, and I didn't want to spend my life that way. I wanted to have a bigger, more interesting life.”

“Technology has brought us further than man could ever imagine, and it makes all information available. But it might not do the same exact thing that one human being asking another human being might do.”

“My world was small growing up. I never really left the three-mile radius of my tiny neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley.”

“I've been in, like, kids' clubs... I've been in the Boom Boom Room in New York, and the kids are going, 'Oh my God, you produced 'Arrested Development?'' They aren't talking about 'A Beautiful Mind' or '24.' It's like the only thing in my whole career was 'Arrested Development,' literally.”

“When I am talking to someone, I can constantly see whether I am failing or succeeding. I am regulating what I am saying in terms of how I think I'm doing. I'm always searching for the truth of a subject or person, and I look at every meeting as a grand experiment.”

“Artists, whether they're Tom Cruise or John Waters or Ron Howard or Oliver Stone, you can empower them to become a better version of themselves, but you cannot change them 180 degrees to be someone they are not.”

“I try to be thoughtful when I speak but not edited. I make mistakes, but people like vulnerability.”

“You have to trust yourself, not research. Not testing. Testing helps, but you have to trust your own taste. If your taste says something isn't any good, don't let research rationalize that out of its own truth.”

“Asking for people's help - rather than directing it - is almost always the smart way of doing things, regardless of the stakes.”

“I think the global mass culture is either consciously or unconsciously sensitized to how vulnerable we are here on the planet.”

“No one in Hollywood really knows what a good idea is before a movie hits the screens. We only know if it's a good idea after it's done.”