Norman Lear Quotes

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Norman Lear

Profession : Producer

Birth : July 27, 1922

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.

Norman Lear

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

Norman Lear

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.

Norman Lear

In this nation, leadership is dollars.

Norman Lear

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.

Norman Lear

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.

Norman Lear

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.

Norman Lear

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

Norman Lear

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.

Norman Lear

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

Norman Lear

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.

Norman Lear

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

Norman Lear

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

Norman Lear

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.

Norman Lear

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.

Norman Lear

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

Norman Lear

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.

Norman Lear

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.

Norman Lear

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

Norman Lear

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.

Norman Lear