Jackie Cooper quotes:

People like Spencer Tracy held up because they had the background originally, but to this day they never have changed Mr. Gable's role, or most of them.

I remember Mr. Mayer very well. He sort of liked to be the father - no, he liked to be treated like you thought he was Daddy, but he didn't treat you like Daddy at all.

They kept me in short pants as long as they could, until they were shaving the hair on my legs because it was beginning to photograph.

But I want to do good work, after this series.

I would also like to act, once in a while, but not get up every morning at 5:30 or six o'clock and pound into the studio and get home at 7:30 or eight o'clock at night, or act over and over and over every night on Broadway, either.

I hope this series is good work, but it is in the half-hour medium, which is limited to a kind of mediocrity that sponsors are just dying to have right now, and the public, for some reason, is unconsciously demanding.

They had to start shaving my chin when I was 12 years old because light started to pick it up.

A lot of people like to run in plays because it's a nice, steady job.

So if I keep making mistakes on Broadway or tape or film, producing, directing or acting, I can go along and do it - so long as I'm not investing too much capital in these things.

To me, the series was the end of the actor, when the series ended.

A nice, steady job I don't need that bad. I'm not that satisfied with it.

I just knew how to do the one thing I did, and whether I did it well or not depended on who the director was.

I never say too much about that in public interviews, because it disappoints the public to tell them you're not that crazy about a property you did that possibly they liked.

So I'm in that half-hour business where the most money is, so that eventually I feel like the people that put on the Dupont show, like maybe my artistic effort is going to be a little different.

In those days, even as a boy, I watched some people that I knew were living way beyond their means.

The studio didn't ask them to learn their trade, they just worked them, and when that personality or that gimmick or whatever they had ran dry at the box office, they were dropped and out.

If it's boring, then it's tiring.

Keep doing what you've been doing and you will keep getting what you've been getting!

Well, they just don't know anything else except that one form of their business, acting, and they don't really want to learn any other part of it, or they would. Directing and producing and putting a show together is very creative, for me.

So then you have to say to yourself: Do I want to be rich, or do I want to do good work?

There was never any effort made out there to improve the artist.

There was only so much television you could do.

Very often on some of this stuff when I'd have to go to work. I'd just give the script a cursory glance. I had no training, and I was a quick study, so nobody knew how involved or not involved I was. But I look at that stuff now and I can see I wasn't involved, and I wasn't very good.