With a television series, there's a hard deadline, and so you have to write even when you're not writing well.

It's a combination of life being unpredictable, and you being super dumb.

I think that if I couldn't write, I would be unemployable.

The real problem with all drugs is that they work. Fantastically. They're great, right up until the moment they kill you.

Pretty much up until The West Wing, our leaders had always been portrayed in popular culture as either Machiavellian or dolts. But I thought, "What if we show a group of people who are highly competent, they're going to lose as much as they win, but we're going to understand that they wake up every morning wanting to do good?" That was really the spirit behind The West Wing.

What's interesting, is that I've found that the more accomplished a director is, the more secure they are in giving direction that sounds incredibly unsophisticated.

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