Quotes from Brian Grazer

Now, I'm a pretty fast and avid reader. But you can't learn the same things in a book or on the Internet that you can in a personal talk with somebody.

I try to be thoughtful when I speak but not edited. I make mistakes, but people like vulnerability.

I think the global mass culture is either consciously or unconsciously sensitized to how vulnerable we are here on the planet.

I know just how often people get told 'no' to their brilliant ideas - not just most of the time, but 90 percent of the time.

When I am talking to someone, I can constantly see whether I am failing or succeeding. I am regulating what I am saying in terms of how I think I'm doing. I'm always searching for the truth of a subject or person, and I look at every meeting as a grand experiment.

By having a little bit of knowledge about many different things, it enables me to talk to people about a subject that they would not ordinarily think I could talk about. It's a lever for me, I suppose.

Artists, whether they're Tom Cruise or John Waters or Ron Howard or Oliver Stone, you can empower them to become a better version of themselves, but you cannot change them 180 degrees to be someone they are not.

You have to know the weeds - to have lived in them - to delegate. I wouldn't want to be a leader who had never lived in the weeds.

The Porsche was just a vehicle to get to another place. I used it to change people's perceptions of me. I had grown up really middle class. USC was filled with elitists, richies who would go skiing every weekend. So I pretended like I was part of that world - to be accepted.

I thought law school was more like the guillotine. I didn't really think I would make it; I just thought this is one of the few ways to potentially get respect, to go to law school.

You should not do everything in your power to make reviewers cranky before - right before they see your movie.

Under no condition can you teach curiosity.

I've been in, like, kids' clubs... I've been in the Boom Boom Room in New York, and the kids are going, 'Oh my God, you produced 'Arrested Development?'' They aren't talking about 'A Beautiful Mind' or '24.' It's like the only thing in my whole career was 'Arrested Development,' literally.

Almost every person that I had a preconception of, I was wrong. With Edward Teller, I was right. He was an autocrat and a technocrat, with no feeling for humanity.

I met Edward Teller. Everything he believed in and stood for was antithetical to what I believed in and stood for. I like running into that in life. I like extreme points of view, a level of commitment - and I certainly love mastery.

I don't like to boss people around. I don't get motivated by telling people what to do, I don't take any pleasure in it. So I manage with curiosity, by asking questions.

You have to trust yourself, not research. Not testing. Testing helps, but you have to trust your own taste. If your taste says something isn't any good, don't let research rationalize that out of its own truth.

Curiosity at work isn't a matter of style. It's much more powerful than that. If you're the boss, and you manage by asking questions, you're laying the foundation for the culture of your company or your group. You're letting people know that the boss is willing to listen.

I started in TV movies and then had success in my move to features with Night Shift and Splash.

Curiosity is the process of asking questions, genuine questions, that are not leading to an ask for something in return.

Technology has brought us further than man could ever imagine, and it makes all information available. But it might not do the same exact thing that one human being asking another human being might do.

A producer is supposed to generate an idea for a movie. And then they're supposed to create the team, the group of people that are gonna make this movie. And within that team, the producer has to have a creative vision and a fiscal vision, and they have to adhere to both things.

When I first started out in the entertainment business, I made a list of people I thought it would be good to meet. Not people who could give me a job or a deal, but people who could shake me up, teach me something, challenge my ideas about myself and the world.

Hollywood is a land of style, a world where how you present yourself matters. Many of the people working here are so dramatically good-looking - that is their style. That's not me, and I know that.