But it also became the experience, or was the experience, of the writers who were attracted to this kind of humor. They're all men or women who come from the same kind of experience in their own lives.

We got ratings. It isn't that they won't quarrel with you, or say you're always right. But as long as you stay strong and the ratings are good and you're reasonable - I don't think we fought unreasonably. We basically won that right.

Nobody doubts my partisanship, but a lot of the activity is nonpartisan.

But it also became the experience, or was the experience, of the writers who were attracted to this kind of humor. They're all men or women who come from the same kind of experience in their own lives.

At great, great remove sit the head of General Electric, the head of News Corp, the head of Viacom, or the head of this giant international corporation that wants these ratings.

I stop and look at traffic accidents. I won't hang around, but when I hear something is terrible, as bad as it is, I've gotta look at it.

TV that people will never see, that giant international corporations will never touch, will never pay your salary.

There was no real controversy with All In The Family. That came from the people on the business end.

But you know, my dad called me the laziest white kid he ever met. When I screamed back at him that he was putting down a race of people to call me lazy, his answer was that's not what he was doing, and that I was also the dumbest white kid he ever met.

In the area we're discussing, leadership begins on Madison Avenue, on the desks and in the offices of people who spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying what will get them ratings.

Originally, with all the shows, we went looking for belly laughs.

I wanted to just do a one-act play for 26 minutes, with commercials at the beginning and end. For years, I couldn't get my way. They wanted to interrupt three times.

You're in the business - when you're a writer, producer, director - to get ratings.

So we gravitated to shows and issues and causes that made people care.

We did an episode on Good Times which came out of a newspaper article about the incidence of hypertension in black males being higher than whites, and increasing. So we did a show in which James, the father on Good Times, had hypertension.

Granted, the writers, directors, producers, and that community make a great deal of money. But they might be choosing to do a whole lot of other things for the living they make.

When we went on the air, I didn't want to be interrupted for an act-one curtain.

The American people may not be the best-educated, but they're very wise at heart.

Life is about having a good time, and it was a good time. We did some things well and some things poorly, but that was always the case.

The trafficking of sex and violence is comes after the demand for ratings.

Maybe they continued to agree with Archie Bunker - as I said earlier, you can't change people's minds, but you can get them to think.

That's the heart of it: My shows were not that controversial with the American people. They were controversial with the people who think for the American people.

It crossed our minds early on that the more an audience cared - we were working before, on average, 240, live people. If you could get them caring - the more they cared, the harder they laughed.

I guess because the shows were activist in their own way - the marriage of my public activism and my career activism, you know - people understand me very well. They also understand there's a very strong bipartisan part in all of this.

Life goes on pretty much the same way. I've been working on a couple of films on the side. You may see some more. You may even see another television show.

I think the greater responsibility, in terms of morality, is where leadership begins.

In this nation, leadership is dollars.

We are a country of excess. So it's not the violence, per se, but the exacerbation and constant repetition.

Even when they don't know who Nixon was, these shows will continue to play.

Life is made up of small pleasures. Happiness is made up of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. And if you don't collect all these tiny successes, the big ones don't really mean anything.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

I've danced one time in my life. It was the most mortifying experience I ever had.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.

Well, the hardest thing to do, as we know from our own experience on 9/11 is protect everything all the time.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

If you live long enough, you'll experience everything.

Actually I'd had a certain amount of experience in Europe in the inter-war period, as a banker, and I was also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Chamber of Commerce.

In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.