The stuff that I write doesn't work very well as background music. You have to watch it from beginning to end and pay attention as if you were watching a play.

An artist’s job is to captivate… if we stumble into truth, we got lucky.

To use a basketball metaphor, West Wing cast was a group that liked to pass as much as they liked to shoot.

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

Only criminals and adulterers should have to hide who they are.

There's a great tradition in storytelling that's thousands of years old, telling stories about kings and their palaces, and that's really what I wanted to do.

Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep can play with the boys but there just aren't that many tour-de-force roles out there for women.