I loved growing up in Montclair... I think it's grown and changed and embraced change.

My job was to find interesting material that would give us a quality television show.

Friends' played in this territory of being funny, and then also just grabbing your heart. And not afraid of that. It was a comedic soap opera. Not being afraid to have an audience feel something, laugh and cry, was quite extraordinary and quite wonderful.

Creating things sometimes is difficult.

You have to laugh at yourself. I do a lot of humor about all ethnicities that are at the show - Latinos, Asians, Indians... What I say is, 'We're laughing together. I'm laughing with you, not at you.' Never say, 'Oh, I'm better than you.'

I don't get a lot of romantic comedy scripts.

Although I had a good job as an advertising manager for a shoe company in Boston, I really liked to fool around with comedy.

Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.