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I wanted to start a hotel company from scratch.

I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, 'Hey, I'm a professional writer now.'

Did I grow up thinking I'd ever be paged at the Beverly Hills Hotel? Did I ever think I'd make so much money writing ads? No.

I write screenplays that don't get made and pilots that don't get picked up, and I re-write other people's movies, and those are all different kinds of fees.

I earned my first steady paycheck watering rose bushes at a nursery for a dollar an hour.

I was writing an earnest novel about cruises in the Caribbean and I just started writing 'Bridget Jones' to get some money, to finance this earnest work, and then I chucked it out.

Well, I wasn't just kind of standing in a queue at McDonald's and someone sat down and said, 'You're the director of a $100 million Hollywood movie.' I've been working in commercials for ten years.

First of all, it was in my contract. I knew I would be directing an episode.

I started off writing kind of big summer, blockbustery kinds of movies, but at that time, I had no name, nobody knew who I was, and somebody told me I can't write movies that are going to cost $100 million to make and expect someone to buy them; it was just impractical.