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

I wrote the show West Wing for the two years before and the two years after 9/11. Suddenly everyone in the world had been through something that our characters had not been through; the whole trajectory of the world had changed. Yet our show took place in a parallel universe. I wasn't really sure what to do about this. In no one's wildest dreams did it occur that an event like this could possibly happen.

Writers are opposite of athletes, they get better with age

A hero would die for his country, but he'd much rather live for it.

Socializing on the internet is to socializing what reality TV is to reality.

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.

People don't live their lives in a series of scenes that form a dramatic narrative, they don't speak in dialogue, they're not lit by a cinematographer or scored by a composer. The properties of real life and the properties of drama have almost nothing to do with each other. The difference between writing about reporters and being a reporter is the same as the difference between drawing a building and building a building.