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.

Elite is not a bad word, it's an aspirational one.

But HBO is less interested in how many people are watching than in how much the people who are watching are liking the show. They didn't set up their business model to make writers happy. It's just a nice unintended consequence.

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 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.

Just to clarify the division of labor on the show, I write the show and Alan [Poul] does everything else.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an actor. I was acting in all the school plays. I went to school for acting. I was really sure that that's what I wanted to do.