Quotes

TV is my sleeping pill.

[on his divorce from his first wife Ellie]: After 11 years of marriage I dived into what I considered a newfound freedom. I was working hard and playing hard. Flying my own plane to parties all over the country and down to Mexico, having what I thought was a great time. I participated in life on what might be considered the grand scale, before I decided I had one hangover too many, one party too many, one charted plane and 14 servants too many. Too many cars that I never got around to drive.

[on why he takes so many acting roles]: I have always considered myself basically unemployed. I'm from Nebraska and I feel guilty when I'm not working.

[on Jack Webb, the producer of O'Hara, U.S. Treasury (1971)] Jack Webb marches to a drummer that is not my drummer.

Good living I've learned, not inherited.

[on high school athletics] I broke a cartilage in my left knee cap while pole vaulting. Calcium formed in my knee, and it is still very painful at times. As for being against athletics in high school - on the contrary, I'm all for it! We don't want to produce a generation of eggheads, do we?

[on Fred Silverman, ABC's programming chief, who canceled Harry O (1973) after two seasons] Silverman wanted more sex and violence in the show. I wanted more humor - more relationship between myself and Anthony Zerbe.

[on the violence depicted in Two-Minute Warning (1976)] We live in a violent world. Unfortunately. I don't care for it. But it's the only world I got to live in. So if motion picture producers and people are depicting what's happening in the world today, which is what we all want to see even though we don't admit it, then you have to have violence as part of our everyday life. If it changes, and if we can make it change, that's something else. In the meantime, this is entertainment as it is today.

You have no idea how much work goes into an hour show. It's three times harder than doing a half-hour show and that's not faulty arithmetic.

[on his films at Universal] I played an 'agreer'. The star would say, 'Don't you think so.' I'd agree with him and disappear from the picture.

[in a October 1979 interview with 'People' magazine] It's harder and harder to get up in the morning. I'm suddenly feeling more and more tired every day. I might prefer the life of a film producer: Get up at ten, have two-hour lunch breaks, fire everybody in the afternoon, and be ready for cocktails at 4:30 PM.