Conflict, when used as a device, makes for good television and bad journalism.

Roxy Sorkin, your father just won the Academy Award. I'm going to have to insist on some respect from your guinea pig.

Music is what mathematics does on a Saturday night.

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.

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.

The Monica Lewinsky scandal was happening at the very time I was writing the West Wing pilot and it was hard, at least for Americans, to look at the White House and think of anything but a punch line. Plus a show about politics, a show that took place in Washington, had just never worked before in American television. So the show was delayed for a year.