21 years as CEO is a long time. I was and probably still am the longest serving CEO in America. Certainly I am in the media industry, bar none.
Well, when you’re trying to create things that are new, you have to be prepared to be on the edge of risk.
If it’s not growing, it’s going to die.
The whole business starts with ideas, and we’re convinced that ideas come out of an environment of supportive conflict, which is synonymous with appropriate friction.
I gravitate toward the team thing. I’m not a golfer – I much prefer basketball.
The movie business has always been like the wild-catting oil business. Everyone wants a gusher.
There’s no good idea that cannot be improved on.
I always went into an area that was in last place, with a philosophy, ‘You can’t fall off the floor.’ And I was lucky, was at the right time and the right place, with the right ideas, and each one of these areas became number one.
Graduate school is a place to hide for a couple of years.
Succeeding is not really a life experience that does that much good. Failing is a much more sobering and enlightening experience.
Diversity is a great force towards creativity.
When I read biographies, I’m only interested in the first few chapters. I’m not interested in when people become successful. I’m interested in what made them successful.
My best idea was to not accept my wife’s negative reaction when I asked her to marry me.
In every business, in every industry, management does matter.
We cannot escape that Hollywood is in the middle of a wave of technological change. The current angst over all the implications of new entertainment technology is nothing new.
Balanced emotions are crucial to intuitive decision making.
I grew up Jewish. I am Jewish. I went to an Episcopal high school. I went to a Baptist college. I’ve taken every comparative-religion course that was available. God? I have no idea.
Privacy laws are our biggest impediment to us obtaining our objectives.
I think when you get inured with the past, you get committed to the past, you stop growing.
Television is very much like the motion picture; you need high-end product that will first go on broadcast or cable and eventually on the Internet, and then the lifespan of this content being distributed worldwide.
User-generated content is not done by professionals. The best user-generated content eventually becomes those people gravitated in the professional world.