James L. Brooks Quotations

I had a marketing idea that everybody hated, decency is sexy.

I love romantic comedy, but I think you have to have another idea that you're chasing along with romantic comedy.

I laugh every day. There are days when my laughs are pretty hollow. Dust comes out of your mouth, and your bones make a funny sound. But I'm laughing.

When you work alongside somebody day in and day out, the relationships tend to be wonderful: they're lifelong.

If you ever catch a great boss, it's just such a rare thing, and it's amazing.

I value comedy. I value somebody who can be funny.

I've done it with Broadcast News-where there was no finish line, there was no agenda that I had to move all the characters to this point, that I was sort of open to what happens.

You become so obsessed, and that's not a bad thing for a movie. Serve it with that sense that it's the whole world.

I love it if comedy reflects real life because to me it's more reassuring that we'll get through.

A lot of things just aren't true any more.

Great things that can happen when you're doing a movie.

Linking up the things you were with the things you become is what growing up is.

I was only in college, unfortunately, for, um, a year. I think my major was public relations, and I had no idea what it meant except it seemed maybe attainable.

I came to 20th Century Fox to do movies, and then they started a network, and they asked me to do a show as part of their starting what became the Fox network.

That's the great thing about a series: you're driving to work, and you have an idea for a story for your characters, and you can go into work, and it's gonna be a television show. I mean that's what's great about the job.

What does it mean for an actor to make a part his own? It means that he takes on what you had intended and starts to put in his own stuff so that it becomes something that could only happen if he played it.

I always fight hard to push a movie to the point where it pulls me.

I always loved writing, but never considered that I could do it professionally.

I have a rule in research: The third time you hear something, it's generally true.

I think you have a pact with an audience in every picture, and I think the pact is to try and be truthful and to be real.

Kids in general make things fresh and alive and they have this great appreciation for, Holy mackerel, we're making a movie!

Media reporting denied privacy to anybody doing what I do for a living. It was no longer possible to work on your picture in privacy.

Things get very distorted when you do a movie, weirdly so.

Working on any show that works is the best job you can possibly have in any area of the business. You've got so much going for you, a good community, everybody's hanging together, and you get to do it every week.

I was raised primarily by women. I had a mother who almost killed herself to survive, I had a sister who was eight years older who was like a second mother, and my mother had two sisters. In the environment I grew up in, I heard a lot of female perspectives.

I don't know whether I have ideas all the time. I think I'm curious about things all the time; I think I'm always curious, and I think I'm always interested in whatever passes by, and I know I tend to think about things, and I tend to talk about things, and sometimes that takes root and gives me something to chase.

I always think that the deal, once I do the script, sort of the experience I go through writing, which is everything you can imagine, but I always think it's the one thing I can do when I'm directing is say is that it's all about the actors, that I can say, 'We're all here to serve the actors.'

I always think a successful television series is the best job because it gives you community, it doesn't demand temporary insanity the way movies do, and you can be almost a normal person.

I think television keeps on being a place where writers can go, and if they're successful, they can have their way, and they can have creative freedom.

Tone is up for grabs in what we do - what's the tone of the scene.

You have more and more people coming into the tent with the creative guys [on Hollywood films]. You have marketing and concept testers, advertising people. What you find gets the high numbers is easily appealing subjects: a baby, a big broad joke, a high concept. Everything is tested. The effect is to lessen the gamble, but in fact you destroy a writer's confidence and creativity once so many people are invited into the tent.

Dagwood Bumstead was a great unrecognized hero of American literature. He showed up every day, he got knocked down every day, he never got to eat his sandwich every day, the dog jumped on him every day, his wife was giving him a hard time and he showed up every day.

The thing that usually gets me through the writing is that my feelings of wretched inadequacy are irregularly punctuated by brief flashes of omnipotence.

When you produce and direct your own film you havethe somewhat consoling feeling that the producer will kill for you.

There was a great director who directed a picture that I wrote who barred me from the set quite appropriately and said, "I'm sorry, Jim. When you're directing, you don't need to know everything. You need the illusion that you do." And, you know, and I WOULD be there behind him trying to signal the actors in, you know, in a way I wasn't even aware of.

I have a lot of nightmares.

I spent two years telling studio heads that it wasn't a cancer picture. I hate cancer pictures. I don't want to see a cancer picture. There is only one thing worth saying about cancer, and that is that there are human beings in cancer wards.

I always believe you can't kill good movies, because somebody's in some room and will die unless it gets made.

It never stops, accepting that fact is difficult. I took some time out for life.

Once you read the script, it's the only way it can be.

I took some time out for life.

Screenwriting is no more complicated than old French torture chambers, I think. It's about as simple as that.