Chuck Barris

Fifty percent of something is better than one hundred percent of nothing.

I could never do a show, or be a personality like Howard Stern, where you take all that heat from critics. What he does, he does, but the critical heat would crucify me.

Helplessness is such a rotten feeling. Theres nothing you can do about it. Being helpless is like being paralyzed. Its sickness. The cure calls for a monumental effort to stand up and start walking somewhere anywhere. But that takes some doing.

There's tons of creative people in television that have one failure after another, and they just step up higher. I could never get over that. When I had a failure, there was no such thing as just getting over it.

The Gong Show provided me with five years of the happiest times of my life, but that's that. And to be known as the guy who gave the world The Gong Show - listen, my Uncle George isn't known as anything. So I guess it isn't so bad in that context.

Spontaneity is such an entertaining facet of show business.