I made a very good living as a bad writer. I wrote a lot of comedies, 'Diff'rent Strokes,' 'Facts of Life,' while all my friends were doing the good shows, like 'Cheers,' but I loved it because I got to be a working writer in Hollywood.
I think every creative impulse that a working writer, or artist of any sort has, comes out of that dark old country where dreams come from.
To be a working writer is the holy grail, where you don't have three other jobs on top of that.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.
I like the idea of being a working writer, not of saying that it's going to take me 30 years to write my magnum opus.
I'm not ever getting a Pulitzer prize and my books aren't on high school reading lists, but for better or worse I'm a working writer.
Television is a great job for a writer in the way that movies used to be, way before my time. Back when writers in Hollywood were on staff or under contract at any given studio and you'd write movie scripts and then the movies would get made within a few weeks, such that you could be a working writer in the movie business back in the '30s and '40s and '50s and have a hand in writing five or six movies a year that actually got produced. The only thing remotely like that in the 21st century here in Hollywood is working in the TV business.
If one real working screenwriter had visited us in college and just said, 'This is what my day is like,' it would have been really helpful.
