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"We had a working relationship with everybody who worked with us. There was nothing imperial about it. We would always work hand in hand with everybody."

"I enjoyed the programming and the manufacture of programs more than anything else. You always take great joy and pride in successful programming -- you program a period and a hit comes out of it, that's a source of great pride." 

"Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mr. Disney next to camera. I kept blowing the line because he was making me nervous. I'd see him there smiling, watching what I was doing. So I called the AD over after one of the takes that I'd blown and said, 'could you ask Mr. Disney if he could please move out of my eyeline?' I didn't want to be disrespectful, but could he move just a little? I saw the AD go over to Mr. Disney and whisper in his ear, and he looked at me, waved and left. I got through the intro. The next day in the trades: 'Mouseketeer Throws Walt Disney Off the Set.'"

"The announcer's role is to enhance your enjoyment of the game by bringing you things you don't have access to. The game is a melody and you're going to provide the lyrics.. I want the viewer to look at me and say 'We can trust this guy.'

"Most mission statements would say, 'To be the largest provider of kids' entertainment in the world.' We didn't do that. [Nickelodeon] had a mission statement which was: 'To connect kids with each other and with their world through entertainment.' Now, that is a big idea."

"Even at age 10 it was fairly clear to me that if the Soviet Union dropped a hydrogen bomb on us, climbing under my little wooden desk and putting my hands over my head wasn't going to help. I spent a lot of time afraid of what's going to happen because I would see these images on television of Khrushchev pounding his shoe at the UN and the tests of the bombs that were being conducted, and I would go to bed terrified. No one talked to me about this. My parents didn't talk to me about what I was watching, my school didn't talk to me, no one in the church talked to me, certainly no one on television addressed my fears as a kid of the news that I was seeing. Don't you think I didn't think about that years later when we went to start Nick News."

"It was a pattern we used successfully in 'The Untouchables," where the framework for the series would be 'the fugitive' running from the law and there would be a human-dimensional story about the characters 'the fugitive' would become involved with. That's really what made the series work."

"That's the formula for comedy: it's one step forward and then two steps back. Or it's two steps forward and one step back. It can never be resolved. Then you have no show."