“ You have to ask these five questions before you get into partnership with anyone on anything significant. Do I like this person? Do I trust this person? Do they do what they say they’re gonna do? Do they finish what they start and have they already...
“I met Joan Rivers, and Joan encouraged me to go to New York. I was not really ready. I did move to New York, and I took my page of jokes that I wrote for Joan, and I went to Rollins and Joffe, the people who promoted Robert Klein and other great people. And...
“Finish what you start. You can’t fix something that’s not done. So if you start writing a book, if you start writing a song, if you start writing a script, a play, that’s awesome. It’s gonna be terrible at first, so don’t worry...
“Something that really in retrospect gave me a breakthrough was writing for an anthology. This publisher said, well, do you have a book? And I’m like, yeah, yeah, I have a book. So they said, we’d like to see it. The anthologies can really sort of...
“Michael Eisner, who is my mentor said, “If you want to have a happy life, be a mentor and have a mentor.” And I would always find kids younger than me or older than me and try to help them along. It’s a virtuous circle, which is an old Greek...
