Government should be a place where people can come together, and no one gets left behind. No one…gets left behind. An instrument of good.

As a dramatist, you're looking for points of friction.

The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one - America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.

There are television critics, movie critics, and theater critics too who I like and who I follow and I get genuinely bummed when they don't like something that I've written because I usually agree with them.

I love writing. I'm not particularly comfortable in the actual world - I'm much more comfortable on the page. So if I could have a life where I could just slip the pages under the door and somebody would slip me a meal back, then that would be perfect for me.

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.

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.