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.

The real problem with all drugs is that they work. Fantastically. They're great, right up until the moment they kill you.

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.

Trying to guess what the (mass) audience wants and then trying to satisfy that is usually a bad recipe for getting something good.

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

That's a very real feeling - that I don't have a story to tell. I'm not a pure storyteller. I have a tough time with story.

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.