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.
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.
TV that people will never see, that giant international corporations will never touch, will never pay your salary.
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.
There was no real controversy with All In The Family. That came from the people on the business end.
So we gravitated to shows and issues and causes that made people care.
You're in the business - when you're a writer, producer, director - to get ratings.
When we went on the air, I didn't want to be interrupted for an act-one curtain.
In this nation, leadership is dollars.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think the greater responsibility, in terms of morality, is where leadership begins.
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.
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.
Even when they don't know who Nixon was, these shows will continue to play.
Originally, with all the shows, we went looking for belly laughs.
