President Bartlet: There's a delegation of cardiologists having their pictures taken in the Blue Room. You wouldn't think you could find a group of people more arrogant than the fifteen of us, but there they are, right upstairs in the Blue Room.

Writers are opposite of athletes, they get better with age

My resting pulse as a writer is writing idealistically and romantically; aspirationally. My taste lies in quixotic heroes.

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.

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.

If you feel that strongly about something, you have an obligation to try and change my mind.

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.