I don't think you can really make television based on what you think audiences want. You can only make stories that you like, because you have to watch it so many times.

It was like in Samoa when they'd put up a movie screen on the beach and show movies and the locals would run behind the sheet to see where the people went. It was pretty grim.

As soon as you become complacent your show gets canceled.

If you're going to vote on a television contract, there is a certain rationality to saying that the same structures that are applied to Health Plan participation should be placed on the right to vote on a strike.

It's show business. No show, no business.

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.

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

I think most people don't react well to being screamed at. It's counterproductive.

There are other options out there, after all, like read a book, go on the Internet, rent a movie.

I don't think you can really make television based on what you think audiences want. You can only make stories that you like, because you have to watch it so many times.

You have this disturbing reality that there are a lot of people who would rather say, 'I'm on strike' than 'I'm unemployed.' And those are the people who vote for strikes.

People recognize certain things, like 'D' means 'this dialogue stinks.' We're dealing with shows that are written here, shot in New York and posted back here. Accurate communication is a necessity.

Everybody knows things are not the same. The people running the TV end of a major vertically integrated company know how much money a successful show can make.

There are professional negotiators working for the writers and the actors, but basically you've got the writers and actors negotiating against businessmen. That's why you get rhetoric.

I hardly see myself as a futurist.

The most positive step is to try to expand the employment base by making it, if not economically friendly, at least not economically disastrous, for studios to take on deficits.

I get bored with establishing shots of people getting out of cars and walking into buildings, getting into elevators and then 45 seconds later they have a line.

The story drove the book. That had a very seminal effect on the way I saw writing and storytelling. If you can set a character in a story that is compelling and has a backbone, you draw people in.

The heart and soul of network programming is series programming, the weekly repetition of characters you like having in your house.

The threat to free television. The reason television is free is because it is a life support system for commercials. That fundamental aspect is about to change.

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

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 watch it.' I mean, please.

The ad revenues still go up because nothing dependably delivers the eyeballs that successful series do.

I do love television. But the business is accelerating and people are not getting the chance to fail.

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.

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

There was an interesting article in Los Angeles Magazine about women directors. A woman director makes one bad independent film and her career is over. Guys tend to get an opportunity to learn from their mistakes.

Their argument is that most shows are losers, which is true, but it's also disingenuous to say, 'We are not going to take the risk unless it is totally covered by the few successful shows that are out there.'

People do have viewing patterns, and you disrupt those at your own peril. That's something that everybody learned after 1988. The numbers have gone down every year since that strike. Big time.

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.

Drama or comedy programming is still the surest way for advertisers to reach a mass audience. Once that changes, all bets are off.

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.

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

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? Why should we watch them?

We're making a commercial Hindi film catering to all types of audiences.

I wonder if that's hurt me at the box office. Maybe audiences these days want to know exactly what to expect when they go into a movie, and my movies are hard to explain in just one way.

Audiences always sound like they're glad to see me, and I'm damned glad to see them.

What I wanted to do was to get that sense of being in touch with this lost world while holding onto what draws readers and audiences there in the first place.

We make films that we ourselves would want to see and then hope that other people would want to see it. If you try to analyze audiences or think there's some sophisticated recipe for success, then I think you are doomed. You're making it too complicated.

Sylvester has a great popular sense, as good as any writer I've ever worked with. He knows what audiences want to see, and what they don't want to see.

Phish and Dave Matthews really know their audiences and really treat them well.

We were tremendously encouraged by the testing of Analyze That. Audiences loved it. They were telling us that they liked it as much as the original. We recorded the laughs in the theater.

Anyway, I collapsed in France in the middle of a tour. I hadn't been eating properly, I was getting very phobic about audiences, and I collapsed in pure fright.

Though I am still very vulnerable to audiences - and it happens all the time - where for some reason the energy doesn't connect and, since the film is very personal, obviously I am made to feel very vulnerable by that.

I don't pay attention to target audiences and therefore I often hear that I am a ratings killer, somebody who fundamentally doesn't care whether one person is watching or an entire soccer stadium.

I want to do what I want when I want to do it not be dictated to by audiences.

I also want to return to doing stand-up. I've become frightened of live audiences. This is a really telling sign that I need to go back on the comedy circuit again.

For me to go back and to play for audiences some of whom have been following me for thirty years and some who have found me in the last five or six years, that's really an interesting thing. I have an audience that goes from kids to seventy year olds.

When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we'll be funnier to look at than to read.