Sherwood Schwartz Quotes

If I knew anything about what people wanted and was popular, I'd still be writing for 'Saturday Night Live'. I can only write what I want, and hopefully people will like it.

If you do television, and it's great, it's the best job there is. Every week it's another opportunity to really make that work and figure out how to make it work better. I love that it's like theater too, and the audience, and it's so short, like twenty minutes... It's like a Haiku or something.

A film has to be for commercial success as well as earn you respect as an artist. You don't want to do only things that are designed to run commercially, and neither do you want to do things that get acclaim but don't run.

The only reason why I would like to be accepted? Because if your movies don't do well, after a while you don't get to make any more movies.

The picture has made its million back in four months; I have been overwhelmed by letters, hundreds of them, literally, begging me in my next production not to swing over the shallow trash of mother love, father love, sister love, brother love.

There are two kinds of success. One is musical or artistic and the other is commercial.

It's wonderful to be able to sit down and write a play.

The only way you can continue to make artistic films is to make an occasional one of those. They kind of keep your marketability going to the extent that people will employ you.

One can do a film and not work for six months, but on TV, you have to produce good content every week. It involves a lot of hard work, as one has to fight for ratings every week. But I have always got love from the audiences, be it during 'The Great Laughter Challenge' or 'Comedy Circus.'

I never know why shows succeed or don't succeed, which is why I look at it as, 'I'll do the best work that I can', and if the fans and people respond then I'm always really flattered and honored, and if they don't then I'll try and do something next time that they like better. But I have no idea what makes a hit show, I really don't.

Every time you do something, people are going to like it, people are going to hate it. You tend to make the movies on the basis you are making them for the people who are going to like them and not worrying too much about people who don't like them.

I never, in anything I've ever done, tried to get you to like it. I was never going to succeed at that. That's not the way most entertainment is made. Most entertainment is trying to get you. It's tested, like toothpaste.

We've ignored audiences all these years. We've just amused ourselves and hoped enough people would want to eavesdrop to make it all viable.

When I did TV shows and my other movies, I never try to do it for anybody. I just do what I think is good no matter what the genre is.

I didn't want to go down the route of spending a year of my life making a movie that would never be seen. I may as well go down a route making a film that a lot of people will see, which is the whole idea behind cinema.

There's a positive side to film and television, the sense of feeding into the theater... Your fans will follow you, hopefully, and be open-minded to see you play other things and experience other stories you want to tell.

Late night is no different than making a film, really, except that it's faster, and if you do a crap one, you can do a better one tomorrow. Writing a novel and doing stand-up - that stuff is very similar.

If it pleases you and you can write at all, it's gonna please somebody else.

I think there's a lot of interesting stuff on TV. I feel much more optimistic about TV than I do about movies. There will always be good movies but I think, for the most part, it's always going to be a huge fight to get those movies made. TV is the best place to be as a writer, I think.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Even though some of the films I've made haven't been particularly commercial, I don't find them failures.

Nowadays you really have to pump out that blockbuster in order to have the luxury of getting a body of work, and that's sad because the work suffers. Today everything is based on money. The older actors, they inspire me.

A good novel doesn't just transcend the boundaries of its target market - it knows nothing about target markets.

My goal is, of course, for this show to do well, and I would love it if people liked it.

We have gotten some terrible reviews at times but if we depended on the judgment of the studios or critics, we never would have made more than one movie.