Quotes from Norman Lear

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

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.

Bud [Yorkin] was the kindest and dearest man, and one of the most talented directors there was.

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.

If there is a reason to believe in God, it would be the Havana Leaf.

I think that of most leaders in religion as power brokers. They give orders, in a sense, to an audience every week, and that's where the definition of God starts.

We just may be the most well-informed, yet least self-aware, people in history.

I wanted to meet Bob Hope, and I got to know him pretty well.

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.

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

If there was a sense of - a bigger sense of responsibility in the various leadership positions in America, things would be not as grotesquely overly done as they are now.

Life is about having a good time.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Ed Simmons and I became stars in the emerging medium of television. We were new and fresh, just like TV at the time, so we automatically became 'THE' comedy writers for television.

Culturally, I think 'All in the Family' was universal enough to have good timing at any time.

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.

I got a call from an agent to come to New York City, and write for the 'Ford Star Revue.' Because at the time there wasn't much 'national television'.