James L. Brooks Quotes
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When you work alongside somebody day in and day out, the relationships tend to be wonderful: they're lifelong.
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Making an authentic film about anything is difficult.
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Great things that can happen when you're doing a movie.
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The fact is that television, even before the movies, offered the chance to control our work and to get to do it again when we did something right. So television has always been better to writers than any other medium for a long time.
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I could see no position to say, 'I'm going to make a living as a writer.' But I went to classes for it; I read every play in 'Theater' magazine. I saw the second acts of everything on Broadway - I had a job as a CBS usher in New York City, and on my way home every night, I'd see what shows I could get into.
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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.
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My greatest regret is that my mother died before I could help her materially.
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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.
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I think you always want to have a project where it's not about you: where you're serving it. Where it has needs, and you're trying to meet those needs, so you're trying to lift it out of you and put it out there and then say to people, 'Hey, I think that's it; let's head that way.'
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Tone is up for grabs in what we do - what's the tone of the scene.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I had a marketing idea that everybody hated, decency is sexy.
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I had no road map for fatherhood; I had no personal history to draw from.
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I love bingeing. 'The Wire' was my first binge, and the thing about bingeing is, when you are doing four or five hours a day for a number of days, it becomes a literary experience, closer to reading.
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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.
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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.
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Watching people see your picture for the first time is such a public agony.
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When I wrote a gay character, I spent six months asking questions I've never asked a gay friend, the questions you don't ask just because you don't have the right to do it.
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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.
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The remarkable thing about 9/11 was that journalism pretty much put down its badges. People didn't worry about reacting as human beings. People who weren't reporters reported. David Letterman was sort of a brilliant reporter for a second - but it was a way nobody had ever covered a story. They just presented what was inside themselves.
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We can go years without making a picture, and that's fine.
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I worked for CBS News in the aftermath of all the greatness. I actually brought coffee to Edward R. Murrow.