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.

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.

From the beginning, the series has been story driven - I began with a story idea - but research feeds it.

I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done.

Since the beginning, I always loved the game. When you grow up in Montreal, one day you want to be a professional hockey player. When I was six or seven, I knew that was what I wanted.

Before beginning, plan carefully.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.

The people who voted for President Obama are just beginning to wake up to exactly what they brought in. The 'change' they envisioned is not the 'change' they have gotten.

Religion has caused more harm than any other idea since the beginning of time. There's nothing good I can say about it. People use it as a crutch.

And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.

In the beginning it was all black and white.

A palindrome is a word or pattern that instead of developing in different directions it folds in on itself so that the beginning and end mirror each other, that they are the same.

Learning is the beginning of wealth. Learning is the beginning of health. Learning is the beginning of spirituality. Searching and learning is where the miracle process all begins.

At the beginning of 1955 only about 60 percent of American homes had TVs.

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Most musicians count at the beginning, and never count and talk to their musicians after that. They only talk to them at the end of the song. But I would count with them and talk.

What you really remember at the beginning was that you have to throw a budget together. We made some terrible mistakes at the beginning in my own budget that took us at least a year to catch up on.

There is a spirit and a need and a man at the beginning of every great human advance. Every one of these must be right for that particular moment of history, or nothing happens.

I am pleased to see that information campaigns, such as the America's WETLAND effort, are getting the message out, and people are beginning to realize that wetlands loss in Louisiana affects us all.

I started working on trying to sound like June from the very beginning.

The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness.