There's that process of writing it - then you come out of your room into the sunlight, and you now have to complete the circuit and make the connection finally with the audience.

If you close your eyes you can imagine the hackers sitting in a room, combing through the documents to find the ones that will draw the most blood. And in a room next door are American journalists doing the same thing. As demented and criminal as it is, at least the hackers are doing it for a cause. The press is doing it for a nickel.

I wrote the show West Wing for the two years before and the two years after 9/11. Suddenly everyone in the world had been through something that our characters had not been through; the whole trajectory of the world had changed. Yet our show took place in a parallel universe. I wasn't really sure what to do about this. In no one's wildest dreams did it occur that an event like this could possibly happen.

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.

And a wheat thin the size of Lake Tahoe.

Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.

The hardest thing for me is getting started. If I'm writing a script, really 90 per cent of it would be just walking around, climbing the walls, just trying to put the idea together. Then the final 10 per cent would be writing it.