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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

If bad taste were a felony, every writer I know would've done prison time.

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

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

What is left when honor is lost?

I don't want to earn my living, I want to live.

Never get angry against fate, she is looking for someone to crush, why put a spotlight on yourself?

Your attitude is a mirror of your believes.

I don't know what kind of courage it took thousands of years ago, but I know how courageous women need to be today.

Science is triumphant with far-ranging success, but its triumph is somehow clouded by growing difficulties in providing for the simple necessities of human life on earth.

I wanted to be a doctor since I was five.

Toughness is a good thing, yet it is considered good only in men. When a woman is tough, men can't stand it. I like being tough and smart.

Painting fulfills a need to be non-intellectual. There are times when we have to get our brains out in our fingers.

Success is found balanced between optimism and realism, where it is unhindered by the weight of pessimism.