Tell me what you think and then tell me what the really smart person in the room who disagrees with you thinks.

We live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns.

It's certainly easy for me to make a fictional character mad about something. I can get them angry about something that I'm relatively indifferent about, just because I'm not educated on it, if I go to someone who is educated about it and is passionate about it. I find a point of fiction and then give it to them.

Music is what mathematics does on a Saturday night.

I would love for people to think that I am as quick, clever, smart and heroic as the characters that I write, but those characters are characters.

The thing I know how to do most is write a play. I came up loving plays and learning about plays and writing plays. I actually feel like an outsider when I'm writing movies and television.

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.