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.

Only criminals and adulterers should have to hide who they are.

The guy who wins the Oscar for Best Actor has a much higher bar to clear than the woman who wins best actress.

We live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns.

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

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.

I'd been concerned all along that the character of the president in the West Wing pilot would throw the ensemble out of whack, that that character would simply take up all the oxygen in a room. I wanted to hold off bringing this character in until the last possible moment.