Quotes

I don't really care how I am remembered as long as I bring happiness and joy to people.

What's the most important thing in the world? It's love, and I look at that as an energy, not a sentiment.

[on why he accepted the role on Green Acres (1965)]: Everyone gets tired of the rat race. Everyone would like to chuck it all and grow some carrots. It's basic. Sign me. I knew it would be successful. Had to be. It's about the atavistic urge, and people have been getting a charge out of that ever since Aristophanes wrote about the plebes and the city folk.

[on his post-war career]: I took everything they could throw at me, pictures like The Dude Goes West (1948) and The Fuller Brush Girl (1950). I worked myself back up, but I never wanted to be a star. I was aiming to play the star's best friend.

[When asked about doing newspapers at an early age, and missed some of the people he kept in contact]: You throw a paper on the porch, but you don't sit down and have a talk...and that's where the real education comes from. And so I missed those best years and I find it difficult for me, in groups, to be comfortable. It's a little late to find that out.

[In a personal journal he has written]: By the time I leave this Earth, I hope to have improved our relationships here and now, so that in the next generation my son, daughter and friends have my shoulders on which to stand, so it's easier to make their contribution.

[on Green Acres (1965)]: The comedy is like "Pickwick Papers", or "Gulliver's Travels", or Voltaire. It's so far out that it becomes truth, deep truth.

[About Green Acres (1965)]: The show is a comment on how insane our society is. The writing was very light and very weird, but it had a profound base under it that none of us knew. Come to think of it, neither did we.

Our priority today, as I see it, is not just conservation, but survival. Not the moon or Mars or even Vietnam, but keeping ourselves alive!

Mankind must survive, the extinction of our national forestry, birds and fish must be stopped. For without it, we face total disaster. We must try to clean up this country's air and water system.

[While having a recurring role as Oliver Wendell Douglas on Petticoat Junction (1963), he continues to play the same character on its spin-off show, Green Acres (1965)]: But that doesn't mean that the work must be monotonous. Monotony is within one's self. Certainly Thoreau didn't find it monotonous in his little shed at Walden Pond.

[In 1965]: I'm allergic to monotony, not to work.

[In 1966]: You can't just push a button and turn on a blaze of family happiness, you must feel close all the time, every day.

[In 1987]: I said I shouldn't really discuss that, because if we really did, she'd faint. But I said, 'The lady of the house here, she lets me sleep with her.' And she kind of went, 'umph mumph' and left.

[on turning 82 in 1988]: I'm happy to be alive. I've had three pieces of cake otherwise I'm looking after my health.

I've always had it. I have a little garden where I grow vegetables. And I always wanted to own a small piece of land, near the woods - not to make a buck, but to watch things grow.

[Of his interest lying with ecology]: I've been a conservationist all my life, but in the last four years, times have changed, and the problem is not so much conservation as it is human survival.

[Who asked and answered London's question in 1969]: You remember London's story, 'To Build a Fire'? He wrote it in that cabin. Another man and I started to walk the 18 miles from the cabin to Henderson's Creek. It was about 32 below, but it began growing colder. I remembered how London wrote about testing the temperature - if your spit exploded on the ice, it was 50 below; if it exploded in midair, it was 75 below. That story haunted me as we walked. It was about a miner who stepped in an alkaline stream and got his foot wet and desperately tried to build a fire before the foot froze. A lot of London's writing was hurried and awkward, but this was beautifully written - sheer poetry.

[on starring in Switch (1975)]: The power of television is so great that I know it's making an impression. But it's difficult to say which impression it is. If you ask me if television and newspapers are creating an attitude of apathy. I'd have to say yes there, too. People are just so surfeited.

[In 1975]: People don't know how good vegetables taste, until they grow their own, and it's also very comforting to know you can still provide for yourself in this day and age.

[In 1976]: You have to recognize that some of these shows are mainly for diversion and laughs, and not wear out your welcome or take advantage of their courtesy. But I get a couple of points in there. If I talk for five minutes about gardens for children, I can make it entertaining and at the same time, hopefully do some good. And this has become my bag.

[Of Robert Wagner's Switch (1975) character]: Pete is a ex-con man, a man who lives against the law. He knows a fellow who can get into the safe at midnight. Mac doesn't want to know about that, but Pete gets the information and he's in no position to complain.

My real concentration is the development of bluegreen algae. It is an organic substance which he says will act as a fertilizer and allow farming with only a small amount of water.

[on his popularity while playing the seventy-something Frank MacBride on Switch]: What else is there? It can't be the plots. They're the same as for every other detective show on the air.

Because I couldn't get work in pictures, I put a club act together with my wife and it caught on pretty well. Finally, Ed Sullivan invited us to appear on Toast of the Town.

[on reviving "Room Service" with son Edward] Comedy is the most difficult thing to play, and I wanted to give Edward a lesson in doing farce.

[About Green Acres (1965) crossing over with Petticoat Junction (1963)]: Petticoat runs to slightly broader comedy. Green Acres is not as broad. I won't fall into a pool. The humor is inherent in the surroundings. I (Oliver) have such a yearning for the country that I want to make my own cheese, grow my own garden vegetables and before moving to the country I had done some farming in our penthouse ... had the biggest squash on Park Avenue! Eva hates it, but is very loyal and when we move to the country, she wants to help. My character is a person who wants to live a simple life ... Only in the series he drives up to the country home in a Continental and attaches an electric blanket out the window to the car battery.

I compare 'Green Acres' to 'The Egg and I,' the successful book and picture about city folks learning to live in the country. Arguments about city life versus country living have been going on since Euripides. We're taking another crack at it.