My characters aren't losers. They're rebels. They win by their refusal to play by everyone else's rules.
Never hit anyone in anger, unless you're absolutely sure you can get away with it.
Nothing reinforces a professional relationship more than enjoying success with someone.
I always claim that the writer has done 90 percent of the director's work.
Find the most talented person in the room and if it's not you, go stand next to him. Hang out with him. try to be helpful.
Just expressing contempt for your leaders doesn't really accomplish anything.
Life has all of these contradictory feelings and contradictory results. People spend their whole lives struggling to get what they think they want, and even if they get it, they find that it's either not what they wanted, or it comes with so many unwanted consequences. We're always shut off from pure joy.
You can't love somebody into a state of mental health.
Well, for me, it's the relationship between comedy and life - that's the edge I live on, and maybe it's my protection against looking at the tragedy of it all. It's seeing life in balance. Comedy and tragedy co-exist. You can't have one without the other. I'm of the school that anything can be funny, if seen from a comedic point of view.
Ive never been a big believer in ghosts or the spirit world, and for me, that was part of the point of the movie, ... What the Ghostbusters represented was the triumph of human courage and human ingenuity. People create their own monsters. Our fears come from within us, not outside.
A psychologist said to me, there are only two important questions you have to ask yourself. What do you really feel? And, what do you really want? If you can answer those two, you probably can leave your neuroses behind you.
I look for the meaning in what's funny, and I look for what's funny about things that are meaningful to me.
You don't have to know much, just a little bit more than everybody else.
Films are big hits when they touch a lot of people. Things are not funny in a vacuum, they're funny because we respond to some personal dislocation, some embarrassment, some humiliation, some pain we've suffered, or some desire we have.
I believe things happen that can't be explained, but so many people seem intent on explaining them. Everyone has an answer for them. Either aliens or things from the spirit world.
Most people live somewhere on the spectrum of anxiety and depression.
I never work just to work. It's some combination of laziness and self-respect.
If people work together, if they can keep a cooperative spirit and use their ingenuity and balance it all with good humor and good will, then there's nothing to be afraid of. That's the sappy part of it, ... On the other hand, every Halloween for many years when my kids were trick-or-treating I would put on my 'Ghostbusters' jumpsuit with a police flashlight to protect all the kids from ghosts.
Comedy is essentially made by young men, or older men with some form of arrested development, for young men or immature older men.
Acting is all about big hair and funny props... All the great actors knew it. Olivier knew it, Brando knew it.
Whatever bliss we think we're going to find, we may find it in brief flashes, fleeting moments that come and go. There's an impossibility to nailing down any good feeling.
When I've written for Bill Murray - I've written six films for him - people would read it and say, "Oh, that's so perfectly Bill." He'd read it and say, "Are you kidding? I can't say these words." So it's all about perception.
I was the little guy who knew how to tie a necktie. It came from having absentee parents. They were tremendously loving and caring people who, by circumstance, had to go to work.
Stand-up is every man for himself; you learn from hanging out at these clubs and watching other guys, and then trying not to be like them.
Life doesn't care about your vision. You just gotta roll with it.
