Top 40 James L. Brooks Quotes

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

I took some time out for life.

Great things that can happen when you’re doing 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.

I was at CBS News on a fluke. I replaced somebody who was on vacation. I worked as a copy boy, then became a news writer.

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

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.

If you write about a process you’re about to go through, market research, and you go through it, and it doesn’t echo what you’ve written about, you’ve failed.

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

Making an authentic film about anything is difficult.

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

When it comes to being confused about what to do about life, that’s been me and will always be me.

It’s craziness to see yourself as damaged goods, so I was the goofy kid who’d stop a strange adult and say, ‘Do you know how to get to Palm Avenue?’ They’d say no, and I’d say, ‘You go two blocks and turn right. You can’t miss it.’

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 had no road map for fatherhood; I had no personal history to draw from.

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.

In television writing, even if you’re running the writers room, it’s a writers room.

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.

With music, you can put sophisticated thoughts in a child’s head – it gives you a whole new avenue to express ideas.

I’m a journalism junkie.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

You know you’re in love when you’re more yourself than you ever imagined possible.

I have a lot of nightmares.

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.

A television job that’s working is the best job in the world.

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.’

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.

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

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

‘Fargo,’ man, with so many actors playing so many great characters, and then they do another season, and it changes all over again? It’s wild.

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

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.

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.

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

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.