If you can socialize from the privacy of your desk at night in a dark room, you can be a smoother, cooler, funnier, sexy, more everything person than you actually are in real life.

The guy who wins the Oscar for Best Actor has a much higher bar to clear than the woman who wins best actress.

Certainly, last year we did an episode about the census and sampling versus a direct statistic. You just said the word 'census', and people fall asleep.

With a television series, there's a hard deadline, and so you have to write even when you're not writing well.

I love writing. I'm not particularly comfortable in the actual world - I'm much more comfortable on the page. So if I could have a life where I could just slip the pages under the door and somebody would slip me a meal back, then that would be perfect for me.

As a dramatist, you're looking for points of friction.

And a wheat thin the size of Lake Tahoe.