Born on November 13th

"In the field of resilience & focus, we are not defined by the weight of our struggles, but by the strength we find when we rise."

"Like a lighthouse in the storm, your inner resolve must remain steady and bright. As a historical figure, this is the foundational truth I have observed."

"The hardest trials do not consume the gold; they refine the spirit and clear the path ahead."

"In the education of the American people, I am Recess."

"There is more to life than show business."

"When I was five years old, my parents gave me a drum set for Christmas. My mom played the piano, and Dad played the saxophone badly. But that Christmas morning, I remember we all played together, and I thought it was the greatest day ever."

"I am a total believer of making the process a good time - make it memorable, have some fun, try to shoot high in your quality and then don't get crazy, see what happens."

"Religion has a good place and it has its good people."

"We can't compete with Mel Gibson, but we figured we could do our part."

"It's a hard job. It means giving up some things, but on the other hand they keep saying you can have it all. You can't really have it all so easy. You can do a little of this and little of that."

"Editing is the only process. The shooting is the pleasant work. The editing makes the movie, so I spend all my life in editing."

"When I edit, I'm not from the school of Hello, I'm a genius, so everybody shut up. I'm from the school of Let's play it once in front of an audience, and then I'll tell you where it is going."

"I don't sit well. I like to move around as I talk."

"There's no better satisfaction than writing. I feel that writing is the best and everything else comes with it."

"You go to a theater now and you literally see parents watching the movie and they suddenly cover their kid's ears. I figured I'd make one movie where they didn't have to do this."

"When in doubt, you bring in relatives. Nepotism is a part of my work."

"I try to find scripts of stories that kinda celebrate the human condition... let's talk about the tough world out there and the human spirit overcoming adversity."

"I didn't want to do movies with hundreds of camels crossing the desert followed by tanks and this and that."

"My mother was funnier than anybody I ever worked for. My father was as funny as this coat. Not a laugh a minute, my father."

"Some journalists are pestier than others, so I find out where the pests are. I am careful with my actors and actresses. I come back and tell them, 'Watch out for this one or that one.' People are surprised I do that. But I watch out for them even after the movie is over."

"A lot of people come work with me because I keep an open set, and people can visit. Julia Roberts used to have friends visit on 'Pretty Woman.'"

"I must confess that the original 'Pretty Woman' was terrific and a hit, but I always felt that creatively I didn't do justice to Richard Gere's character. So in the musical, we have some great new moments for Richard's character."

"My first name, with the rare two-r spelling, came from a sportswriter named Garry Schumacher. My parents didn't know him personally, but my mother liked the spelling."

"My happiest moments of growing up in the Bronx were when my mom would bring home a new sports magazine from the candy store. I would jump out of bed and grab it from her. Then I'd rip the front cover right off and tape it to my bedroom wall."

"I never got beaten up, because I was a wisecracking jokester. I could make a bully laugh before he delivered a punch."

"I always wanted to be known as the Norman Rockwell of television, and 'Happy Days' represented the part of me that wanted to make mainstream America laugh."

"Let's start at the very end: The postscript of Stephen King's 'On Writing' contains some of the most harrowing pages he has ever written. It's here that King describes the traffic accident that nearly killed him in June 1999."

"Lionel Essrog, the twitching, barking, gabbling narrator of Jonathan Lethem's new novel, 'Motherless Brooklyn,' is no movie-of-the-week novelty grafted onto a noir mystery. Maybe his Tourette's is a gimmick, but it's a gimmick with depth, with soul."

"Many critics, when trying to praise a short-story collection, will say that it has the heft and scope of a good novel. But for me, one of the highest compliments you can pay a novel is to say that it has the rich texture and eloquent detail of a good story collection."

"Future historians trying to determine what it was like to be alive in fin de millennium America should read the last two decades of O. Henry and Best American short-story collections."