Breakthroughs, in art, in culture, in personality, come when tackling the unexpected.
Information is currency. … Power is a place as well as a verb; it is inside the information tent.
Love and friendship, two of life’s abiding rewards, are endangered species in Hollywood. People crave both, mistaking alliance for friendship, lust for love, and ambition for both.
Every single one of us who has been a Woman in Film for more than five minutes is sick of the phrase Women in Film.
My sense of Los Angeles was very New York provincial, as in ‘all those people are crazy out there’ (which they are), and stupid (which they’re not), and immoral (it’s more interesting than that).
The key to moving a maybe to a yes is to make the buyer feel as though other buyers have already said yes. … It helps if it’s true, but it never is. No one wants to be the first yes. Why is this? I don’t know, but I think it’s anthropological.
Always remember the famous adage about the movie business: You can’t make a living, you can only get rich.
In most fields of endeavor there are no easy jobs; there are only graceful ways of performing difficult ones.
When I was starting out, the first women studio heads and writers were just getting into their perches – development execs learning their chops.
[On filmmaking:] Cardinal rule: It’s a youth business.
Directing is the last frontier for women in the movie business. We are studio heads, we are producers and we are writers, but we are not directors in any numbers.
Everything can be undone, including success.