Top 30 Brian Grazer Quotes

When I first started out in the entertainment business, I made a list of people I thought it would be good to meet. Not people who could give me a job or a deal, but people who could shake me up, teach me something, challenge my ideas about myself and the world.

I find rejection or failure to be a really interesting and valuable experience.

I was 45 years old when I decided to learn how to surf.

Where do I get the confidence to be different? A lot of it comes from curiosity. I spent years as a young man trying to understand the business I’m in. I have spent decades staying connected to how the rest of the world works.

No one in Hollywood really knows what a good idea is before a movie hits the screens. We only know if it’s a good idea after it’s done.

The physical effort of reading drains some of the pleasure I might take from whatever I’m reading.

Being interested in other fields and meeting experts outside entertainment – whether it’s a two-hour conversation with John Nash that turns into ‘A Beautiful Mind’ or talking to people in architecture or fashion, CIA directors or Nobel laureates – has given me a better sense of which ideas feel authentic and new.

Curiosity at work isn’t a matter of style. It’s much more powerful than that. If you’re the boss, and you manage by asking questions, you’re laying the foundation for the culture of your company or your group. You’re letting people know that the boss is willing to listen.

Now, I’m a pretty fast and avid reader. But you can’t learn the same things in a book or on the Internet that you can in a personal talk with somebody.

I worked for a couple of screamers in my early days in Hollywood. I don’t like being screamed at, and I am not myself a screamer.

You can get good at finding access in the entertainment business. But the ideas, the narratives themselves, they are the only things that are going to be of any value.

In Hollywood, people tend to have the same sensibilities, the same taste and values, and I didn’t want to spend my life that way. I wanted to have a bigger, more interesting life.

By having a little bit of knowledge about many different things, it enables me to talk to people about a subject that they would not ordinarily think I could talk about. It’s a lever for me, I suppose.

I think that we all absolutely have curiosity. It brings about knowledge. It’s energizing. It’s spiritually empowering. It makes us more interesting as people.

Everybody in Hollywood has to beat the ‘no’ – and if you write code in Silicon Valley, or if you design cars in Detroit, if you manage hedge funds in Lower Manhattan, you also have to learn to beat the ‘no.’

I know just how often people get told ‘no’ to their brilliant ideas – not just most of the time, but 90 percent of the time.

The Porsche was just a vehicle to get to another place. I used it to change people’s perceptions of me. I had grown up really middle class. USC was filled with elitists, richies who would go skiing every weekend. So I pretended like I was part of that world – to be accepted.

I’ve been in, like, kids’ clubs… I’ve been in the Boom Boom Room in New York, and the kids are going, ‘Oh my God, you produced ‘Arrested Development?” They aren’t talking about ‘A Beautiful Mind’ or ’24.’ It’s like the only thing in my whole career was ‘Arrested Development,’ literally.

I don’t keep a list of people I want to talk to. It’s organic. But I’d like to interview Tom Brady. Someday I’d love to meet Vladimir Putin. I’d ask him how he sees the landscape of the world, what could make it better, how that could be done.

Under no condition can you teach curiosity.

Asking for people’s help – rather than directing it – is almost always the smart way of doing things, regardless of the stakes.

They say that life is tough enough. But I guess I like to make things difficult on myself, because I do that all the time. Every day and on purpose. That’s because I believe in disrupting my comfort zone.

You should not do everything in your power to make reviewers cranky before – right before they see your movie.

Curiosity and creating ideas ironically are both democratized; they cost no money, anyone can do them, and it’s up the individual and the force of their personality to give life to them.

I thought law school was more like the guillotine. I didn’t really think I would make it; I just thought this is one of the few ways to potentially get respect, to go to law school.

I like BBC news; I like some London news because you can get it earlier then anywhere else. I like Charlie Rose a lot.

There is evidence that people do want to watch shows back to back – that’s why DVR use is so high. When you’re able to DVR something, people will watch more than one episode.

My world was small growing up. I never really left the three-mile radius of my tiny neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley.

I try to be thoughtful when I speak but not edited. I make mistakes, but people like vulnerability.

I only make movies that are interesting to me.