James L. Brooks

“What does it mean for an actor to make a part his own? It means that he takes on what you had intended and starts to put in his own stuff so that it becomes something that could only happen if he played it.”

“I always think that the deal, once I do the script, sort of the experience I go through writing, which is everything you can imagine, but I always think it's the one thing I can do when I'm directing is say is that it's all about the actors, that I can say, 'We're all here to serve the actors.'”

“I love romantic comedy, but I think you have to have another idea that you're chasing along with romantic comedy.”

“'Fargo,' man, with so many actors playing so many great characters, and then they do another season, and it changes all over again? It's wild.”

“You become so obsessed, and that's not a bad thing for a movie. Serve it with that sense that it's the whole world.”

“I came to 20th Century Fox to do movies, and then they started a network, and they asked me to do a show as part of their starting what became the Fox network.”

“I had a marketing idea that everybody hated, decency is sexy.”

“If you ever catch a great boss, it's just such a rare thing, and it's amazing.”

“I always think a successful television series is the best job because it gives you community, it doesn't demand temporary insanity the way movies do, and you can be almost a normal person.”

“You know you're in love when you're more yourself than you ever imagined possible.”

“I have a rule in research: The third time you hear something, it's generally true.”

“I was raised primarily by women. I had a mother who almost killed herself to survive, I had a sister who was eight years older who was like a second mother, and my mother had two sisters. In the environment I grew up in, I heard a lot of female perspectives.”

“Nothing is a matter of course when you get to do your own thing. It's always a gift that can stop giving and probably will.”

“The fact is that television, even before the movies, offered the chance to control our work and to get to do it again when we did something right. So television has always been better to writers than any other medium for a long time.”

“I love it if comedy reflects real life because to me it's more reassuring that we'll get through.”

“Things get very distorted when you do a movie, weirdly so.”

“I took some time out for life.”

“Watching people see your picture for the first time is such a public agony.”