Vivid images are like a beautiful melody that speaks to you on an emotional level. It bypasses your logic centers and even your intellect and goes to a different part of the brain.

Hill Street Blues might have been the first television show that had a memory. One episode after another was part of a cumulative experience shared by the audience.

I think the best work flows out of a collaborative environment.

Film provides an opportunity to marry the power of ideas with the power of images.

Vivid images are like a beautiful melody that speaks to you on an emotional level. It bypasses your logic centers and even your intellect and goes to a different part of the brain.

Being a good television screenwriter requires an understanding of the way film accelerates the communication of words.

You have to give directors and cinematographers a word blueprint for visuals, but I had to learn that from experience.

Casting is sort of like looking at paintings. You don't know what you'll like, but you recognize it when you see it.

Imagery is like music.

One of the problems of writing is that anyone who commits themselves to that process has to believe that they're good.

Hill Street Blues gave me an opportunity to work with an ensemble cast of people whose work I admired.

'Hill Street,' because of the wacky nature of many of our characters, really allowed us to indulge a kind of cheek-to-jowl juxtaposition of high drama with very low humor.

Cop shows are by definition melodramatic; they're larger than life. They create very stark contrasts and conflicts emotionally. They're provocative, assuming they grapple with - to the extent that cop shows are mirrors of the culture.

I remember practically every joke I've ever heard in my life.

I tend not to spend a lot of time looking in the rearview mirror. If you say, 'Oh, I did 'Hill Street Blues' or 'L.A. Law' and everything I do has to measure up to some preconceived notion of that,' it would paralyze you.

I'd always thought that 'NYPD Blue' really would open those doors. While I think it created a much broader template for cable, I don't think it really did that much for network television.

Privately, we always called 'Hill Street' 'Cop Soap.'

Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience.

The entertainment world, television, movies, social media, YouTube stuff, we're so bombarded with so much imagery and such a great sense of inhumanity, and there is a coarseness, a coarsening of interaction.

The thing that always interests me from a storytelling point of view is how that moment of trauma, whatever the trauma is, even divorce, your dog dies, whatever it is, the consequence, in terms of people's emotional lives and the way it resonates behaviorally for a long time, is really the stuff that interests me.

When it is perceived that a show has gone awry, the pressure is staggering, and as a writer caught in that storm, it feels like you are being attacked by jackals.

When you look at Mark Zuckerberg and Snapchat and all these twentysomething billionaires, it's really kind of fascinating; a classic tale of the haves and have-nots.

It is better to have a fair intellect that is well used than a powerful one that is idle.

I have some strategical vision, I could calculate some few moves ahead and I have an intellect that is badly missed in the country which is run by generals and colonels.

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.

I think we actually punish children out of their relationship with their bodies... we categorically separate mind and body and emotion and intellect.

Human beings are accustomed to think of intellect as the power of having and controlling ideas and of ability to learn as synonymous with ability to have ideas. But learning by having ideas is really one of the rare and isolated events in nature.

Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life.

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.

What's right about America is that although we have a mess of problems, we have great capacity - intellect and resources - to do some thing about them.

The relation between practical and spiritual spheres in music is obvious, if only because it demands ears, finger, consciousness and intellect.

Through shallow intellect, the mind becomes shallow, and one eats the fly, along with the sweets.

The intellect of the wise is like glass; it admits the light of heaven and reflects it.

In order to accommodate to change and to the contrast of phenomena, the intellect does not require any shocks and inner upheavals; it is only through such upheavals that the more conservative mind could accommodate to the metropolitan rhythm of events.

The battle was first waged over the right of the Negro to be classed as a human being with a soul; later, as to whether he had sufficient intellect to master even the rudiments of learning; and today it is being fought out over his social recognition.

Napoleon was probably the equal at least of Washington in intellect, his superior in education. Both of them were successful in serving the state.

The restriction of studies of human intellect and character to studies of conscious states was not without influence on a scientific studies of animal psychology.

Every dogma, every philosophic or theological creed, was at its inception a statement in terms of the intellect of a certain inner experience.

Since the days of Abraham many men of unusual intellect not only have diligently studied the divine plan, but have devoted their lives to having a part in making it known to others.

The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.

Nothing can be found in the intellect if previously has not been found in the senses.

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.

Walking is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect but to turn it out to play for a season. All great men of letters have therefore been enthusiastic walkers.

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.

A human being has been given an intellect to make choices, and we know there are other food sources that do not require the killing of a creature that would protest being killed.

Two qualities are indispensable: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead.

None speak of the bravery, the might, or the intellect of Jesus; but the devil is always imagined as a being of acute intellect, political cunning, and the fiercest courage. These universal and instinctive tendencies of the human mind reveal much.

Faith is the heroism of the intellect.