I don't want to analyze myself or anything, but I think, in fact I know this to be true, that I enter the world through what I write. I grew up believing, and continue to believe, that I am a screw-up, that growing up with my family and friends, I had nothing to offer in any conversation. But when I started writing, suddenly there was something that I brought to the party that was at a high-enough level.

I love writing. I'm not particularly comfortable in the actual world - I'm much more comfortable on the page. So if I could have a life where I could just slip the pages under the door and somebody would slip me a meal back, then that would be perfect for me.

And a wheat thin the size of Lake Tahoe.

Any time you get two people in a room who disagree about anything, the time of day, there is a scene to be written. That's what I look for.

You're going to fall down, but the world doesn't care how many times you fall down, as long as it's one fewer than the numbers of times you get back up.

She's a person; the doctor pronounces her dead, not the news.

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.