I'm a playwright. All I care about is the play being good.

Elite is not a bad word, it's an aspirational one.

Trying to guess what the (mass) audience wants and then trying to satisfy that is usually a bad recipe for getting something good.

I've never met anyone who has said, "My goal is to make America mediocre." That's a kind of hard-right conservative fallacy.

One of the biggest challenges in the past for me in working on the networks was that audiences have grown accustomed to television being something that keeps you company-background music, something that you have on while you're flipping through a magazine, cooking dinner, talking on the phone, putting the kids to bed.

Any time you get two people in a room who disagree about anything, the time of day, there is a scene to be written. That's what I look for.

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