It's always helpful to learn from your mistakes because then your mistakes seem worthwhile.
Learn to work with people you wouldn't go to lunch with.
If you’ve got the comedy eye, you can look at any situation and see the humor in it while others don’t.
I am a total believer of making the process a good time - make it memorable, have some fun, try to shoot high in your quality and then dont get crazy, see what happens.
Never underestimate the power of your sister.
[The movie Beaches] was really about how women fight. Women fight, say terrible things to each other and an hour later they make up and go shopping. I think they got the better idea of how it should be done.
I'm too old to be forced.
Women are pretty good. Women usually fight about some stupid guy and then when they figure out it's just a stupid guy they make up and move on.
There's no better satisfaction than writing. I feel that writing is the best and everything else comes with it
I wrote three years for Lucille Ball. She taught me everything I know about physical comedy...
One of my thrills of the business is to find young people, there's a window. I like young people who are in that brief window between on their-way-up and rehab. In that window I can make stars. It's not really true but it's not so far off.
You go to a theater now and you literally see parents watching the movie and they suddenly cover their kid's ears. I figured I'd make one movie where they didn't have to do this.
Editing is the only process. The shooting is the pleasant work. The editing makes the movie, so I spend all my life in editing
People always say, well, how do you get through show business? How do you swim the waters? And how do you survive and all that? I had a very solid method, and that is team up with ambitious partners.
I think a lot of creative people have no sense of numbers and economics.
I'm basically a writer, it's who I am. I direct and I like theatre directing very much. But I've done 17 movies, they don't say 'Let's get Garry, he'll make a helicopter shot,' they say 'Get Garry, he'll fix the script.'
I was very proud of that, of taking women and making them vulnerable and so I continued doing that. Right after Beaches I did "Pretty Woman", then I did "Frankie and Johnnie" and then I did "Other Sister" and "Princess Diaries" so that helped me get into the vein there of understanding women and trying to make them very pretty and very interesting.
I made nepotism an art form, so I get to work with a lot of relatives and they're part of it.
If you're creative, they let you be the showrunner, producer. The first thing my partner and I did as producers was hire ourselves as directors - because who else would hire me?
I dont sit well. I like to move around as I talk.
I played a lot of ball and got hurt, stitches and this and that. That, sometimes they said, built character. I don't think it built anything.
My partner after Fred Freeman was Jerry Belson. And Jerry Belson, after I was doing so well writing situation comedy, said, this is not good enough. We got to create our own shows. I said, but we're very happy doing this. No, no, no, you got to get your own show. So he made me - and he and I created our own shows. And we actually - everything we created failed. "Hey, Landlord" was our first show - 99th in the ratings. But imagine this - it's a great reflection on the years.
Now women are rising to great positions and they run most of the studios now.
You can't have an actor where the audience says, aw, that poor, sweet guy. You got to get somebody who's, like, nondescript in a way or just somebody that looks a little like they should get it. So this is all I learned actually learn from Lucy [Ball].
I had never done a Director's Cut narration on Beaches so I did in time for the release of the DVD. It was a great visit and I do a whole-behind-the-scenes thing and I tell stories about Bette [Mudler] and Barbara Hershey and everybody and that was fun. It made me cry again.
