Norman Lear Quotes (43 Quotes)

My family argued at the top of their lungs and on the edge of their nerves, forever. That's what they did, so that was my experience.

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.

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 elected to do All In The Family instead, because of my feelings for the characters, as a result of growing up with my own dad.

So we gravitated to shows and issues and causes that made people care.

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.

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.

I know a lot of white people who have a lot more money than I do.

In this nation, leadership is dollars.

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.

This isn't the best time for America laughing at ourselves. I think political satire thrives much more at a time when we're in a mood to laugh at ourselves. The degree of political correctness has just gotten terrible.

It's a happy coincidence that when we bought the Fantasy catalog we were also able to sign one of the most relevant and talented singer-songwriters of our generation. We're all enormous fans of his music. He's a big hero here.

There is excess violence, excess sensationalism, excess sex. We are looking at an excessive culture, and to see the excess only in Hollywood is a mistake that lifts a branch to block out the entire forest. The endemic problem is the excess that flows from the corporate need to deliver a profit statement this quarter larger than the last at the expense of every other value. You see that clearly in Hollywood.

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.

We are a country of excess. So it's not the violence, per se, but the exacerbation and constant repetition.

We intend to travel it across the country because it is the living document that set this nation up, ... And it lives today, and those words are for everybody. We want to remind everybody of them.

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.

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.

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.

When we went on the air, I didn't want to be interrupted for an act-one curtain.

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.

I think the greater responsibility, in terms of morality, is where leadership begins.

Originally, with all the shows, we went looking for belly laughs.

I'm hearing all the time from young people who are watching The Jeffersons or Good Times or All In The Family. So those shows are working for them.

The American people may not be the best-educated, but they're very wise at heart.

TV that people will never see, that giant international corporations will never touch, will never pay your salary.

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.

The trafficking of sex and violence is comes after the demand for ratings.

It looks a little nutty. It's hard to believe people pay any attention to it.

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.

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.

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.

Even when they don't know who Nixon was, these shows will continue to play.

Carroll O'Connor as Archie Bunker was a genius at work, God's gift to the world. He is etched permanently in our memories.

Well, they're all family shows - they're all about families, and they're all about America. That's how I grew up. Those are my people, all of them.

We just had a wonderful time. It was a very different time in our culture, generally.

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.

You're in the business - when you're a writer, producer, director - to get ratings.

Nobody doubts my partisanship, but a lot of the activity is nonpartisan.

There was no real controversy with All In The Family. That came from the people on the business end.

What the Democrats dont get is that while the American people are longing for authenticity, they come across as totally inauthentic, ... because they try to represent what they think the American people want, and in the process entirely lose themselves. Ironically, as a result, there are now over 60 percent of Americans opposed to the war in Iraq who are not represented by either political party.

Instead of keeping it in private hands on some wall someplace, this will travel to schools, to libraries in 50 states.

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.