Top 39 James L. Brooks Quotes
#1. Dagwood Bumstead was a great unrecognized hero of American literature. He showed up every day, he got knocked down every day, he never got to eat his sandwich every day, the dog jumped on him every day, his wife was giving him a hard time and he showed up every day.
James L. Brooks
#2. 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.
James L. Brooks
#3. Screenwriting is no more complicated than old French torture chambers, I think. It's about as simple as that.
James L. Brooks
#4. I had a marketing idea that everybody hated, decency is sexy.
James L. Brooks
#5. Honey, lately your low self-esteem is just good common sense
James L. Brooks
#6. 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.
James L. Brooks
#7. 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.
James L. Brooks
#9. 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.
James L. Brooks
#10. I always fight hard to push a movie to the point where it pulls me.
James L. Brooks
#11. 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.
James L. Brooks
#12. If you ever catch a great boss, it's just such a rare thing, and it's amazing.
James L. Brooks
#13. 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.
James L. Brooks
#14. I love romantic comedy, but I think you have to have another idea that you're chasing along with romantic comedy.
James L. Brooks
#15. I always loved writing, but never considered that I could do it professionally.
James L. Brooks
#17. It never stops, accepting that fact is difficult.
I took some time out for life.
James L. Brooks
#18. 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.
James L. Brooks
#19. I think television keeps on being a place where writers can go, and if they're successful, they can have their way, and they can have creative freedom.
James L. Brooks
#20. 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.'
James L. Brooks
#21. Things get very distorted when you do a movie, weirdly so.
James L. Brooks
#22. When you work alongside somebody day in and day out, the relationships tend to be wonderful: they're lifelong.
James L. Brooks
#24. I spent two years telling studio heads that it wasn't a cancer picture. I hate cancer pictures. I don't want to see a cancer picture. There is only one thing worth saying about cancer, and that is that there are human beings in cancer wards.
James L. Brooks
#25. When you produce and direct your own film you havethe somewhat consoling feeling that the producer will kill for you.
James L. Brooks
#26. Kids in general make things fresh and alive and they have this great appreciation for, Holy mackerel, we're making a movie!
James L. Brooks
#28. Linking up the things you were with the things you become is what growing up is.
James L. Brooks
#29. 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.
James L. Brooks
#30. Tone is up for grabs in what we do - what's the tone of the scene.
James L. Brooks
#31. 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.
James L. Brooks
#32. The thing that usually gets me through the writing is that my feelings of wretched inadequacy are irregularly punctuated by brief flashes of omnipotence.
James L. Brooks
#33. I have a rule in research: The third time you hear something, it's generally true.
James L. Brooks
#34. 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.
James L. Brooks
#36. Great things that can happen when you're doing a movie.
James L. Brooks
#37. 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.
James L. Brooks
#38. I love it if comedy reflects real life because to me it's more reassuring that we'll get through.
James L. Brooks
#39. 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.
James L. Brooks
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