Jackie Cooper Quotes

I've never liked having like a set kind of schedule of training. Even when I was doing guitar lessons, I never used to practice.

It's something that I love about this business and that scares me about this business, but in a good way. You just never know what's going to happen. And things change constantly. But there's always opportunities for new work, so you just have to enjoy the job that you're on while you're on it because it doesn't last forever.

The video maker doesn't easily face a blank page. Because the videomaker can run it either any way, this way or the other way and erase it if they don't like it and so on.

Shooting in Hong Kong, you can do whatever you want, even change the script every day. In Hollywood, you have to have a lot of meetings.

I really like to experiment. That's the only way I can work. It's instinctive.

I spent most of my high school years on movie sets and I'd have like one teacher, which was really bad.

The things we know best are the things we haven't been taught.

It's really important to me not to be a snob about age division or about genre or whatever. The story needs to be what the story needs to be.

I never went to business school. I was just bumbling through a lot of my life. I was like the guy behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz.

I just kind of change, constantly, what my focus is. So whatever is stimulating me or inspiring me at the time is what I focus on.

I never map things out in advance. It would be better if I did and more economical in terms of time, but I've found that if you work out a plot line from beginning to end, at the beginning it becomes very rational.

It's not easy to change the way you play when you are 30.

When you're building a show from the ground up, there are no answers or wrong move, because there's no bible.

The parenting books didn't work for me; I got my parenting lessons from everything but the books! And it was about figuring things out. So every time I had a thought, I would put down my conclusions and thoughts.

Unfortunately, when you're learning on the job, things can go wrong.

There's one rule that I have on my movies, which is that anything that you want to do, you can do. But! There's a flip side to that, which is that anything I want you to do, give it a try also.

I didn't go to no school for acting. I learned it all by trial and error.

No creator in modern times is going to stick around with a concept for 20 years. There are simply too many alternatives that writers want to pursue.

Having the security of being in a series week in, week out gives you great flexibility; you can experience with yourself, try a different scene different ways. If you make a mistake one week, you can look at it and say, 'Well, I won't do that again,' and you're still on the air next week.

You see something happening and you bang away at it. Either you get what you saw or you get something else--and whichever is better you print.

The fact that Maurice Sendak said, "This is something that I made at your age, this was something that was personal to me, and now you need to take it and make something that's personal to you." I don't know, but we made the Where The Wild Things Are movie that we set out to make, and Maurice loves it. If Maurice was anxious about it, then I would be petrified.

From a very young age, I was the kind of kid you can just put anywhere and I'd still find stuff to be stoked about.

The directors I consider really great have the ability to recognize when something's going in an unexpected direction and see it as a bonus and be able to go with it, as opposed to locking down what they thought was going to happen.

I came from a Sorkin-like project in the sense that there was no freedom to change a line, which, in a weird way, is its own freedom because you're living within that structure and know this is what it is. You just adjust. Every project has its own personality.

Half of wisdom is learning what to unlearn.