James L. Brooks Quotes

24 quotes in 365 categories

• I had a marketing idea that everybody hated, decency is sexy.
• Kids in general make things fresh and alive and they have this great appreciation for, Holy mackerel, we're making a movie!
• Great things that can happen when you're doing a movie.
• A lot of things just aren't true any more.
• I love romantic comedy, but I think you have to have another idea that you're chasing along with romantic comedy.
• 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 think you have a pact with an audience in every picture, and I think the pact is to try and be truthful and to…
• Things get very distorted when you do a movie, weirdly so.
• 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.
• Screenwriting is no more complicated than old French torture chambers, I think. It's about as simple as that.
• 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…
• You have more and more people coming into the tent with the creative guys [on Hollywood films]. You have marketing and concept testers, advertising people.…
• 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…
• The thing that usually gets me through the writing is that my feelings of wretched inadequacy are irregularly punctuated by brief flashes of omnipotence.
• I have a lot of nightmares.
• I value comedy. I value somebody who can be funny.
• 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…
• I took some time out for life.
• I always fight hard to push a movie to the point where it pulls me.
• Linking up the things you were with the things you become is what growing up is.

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