James L. Brooks

“When I wrote a gay character, I spent six months asking questions I've never asked a gay friend, the questions you don't ask just because you don't have the right to do it.”

“I laugh every day. There are days when my laughs are pretty hollow. Dust comes out of your mouth, and your bones make a funny sound. But I'm laughing.”

“I was only in college, unfortunately, for, um, a year. I think my major was public relations, and I had no idea what it meant except it seemed maybe attainable.”

“Working on any show that works is the best job you can possibly have in any area of the business. You've got so much going for you, a good community, everybody's hanging together, and you get to do it every week.”

“I have a lot of nightmares.”

“I'm big on research.”

“I was at CBS News on a fluke. I replaced somebody who was on vacation. I worked as a copy boy, then became a news writer.”

“In my mind, if you write a comedy where human beings experience pain, you're just being realistic.”

“It's craziness to see yourself as damaged goods, so I was the goofy kid who'd stop a strange adult and say, 'Do you know how to get to Palm Avenue?' They'd say no, and I'd say, 'You go two blocks and turn right. You can't miss it.'”

“I think you always want to have a project where it's not about you: where you're serving it. Where it has needs, and you're trying to meet those needs, so you're trying to lift it out of you and put it out there and then say to people, 'Hey, I think that's it; let's head that way.'”

“I could see no position to say, 'I'm going to make a living as a writer.' But I went to classes for it; I read every play in 'Theater' magazine. I saw the second acts of everything on Broadway - I had a job as a CBS usher in New York City, and on my way home every night, I'd see what shows I could get into.”

“When you work alongside somebody day in and day out, the relationships tend to be wonderful: they're lifelong.”

“I always loved writing, but never considered that I could do it professionally.”

“That's the great thing about a series: you're driving to work, and you have an idea for a story for your characters, and you can go into work, and it's gonna be a television show. I mean that's what's great about the job.”

“I always fight hard to push a movie to the point where it pulls me.”

“I've done it with Broadcast News-where there was no finish line, there was no agenda that I had to move all the characters to this point, that I was sort of open to what happens.”

“My greatest regret is that my mother died before I could help her materially.”

“I love bingeing. 'The Wire' was my first binge, and the thing about bingeing is, when you are doing four or five hours a day for a number of days, it becomes a literary experience, closer to reading.”

“The remarkable thing about 9/11 was that journalism pretty much put down its badges. People didn't worry about reacting as human beings. People who weren't reporters reported. David Letterman was sort of a brilliant reporter for a second - but it was a way nobody had ever covered a story. They just presented what was inside themselves.”

“In television writing, even if you're running the writers room, it's a writers room.”