I think it's up to writers to write stuff that is compelling enough that people want to watch.

If you can socialize from the privacy of your desk at night in a dark room, you can be a smoother, cooler, funnier, sexy, more everything person than you actually are in real life.

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

There's a great tradition in storytelling that's thousands of years old, telling stories about kings and their palaces, and that's really what I wanted to do.

My preference would have been to not go back on the air after 9\11, at all until the time felt right but that wasn't an option.

Certainly, last year we did an episode about the census and sampling versus a direct statistic. You just said the word 'census', and people fall asleep.

Larry David called me and said, "You can never watch The West Wing again. Either the show is going to be great without you and you're going to be miserable, or the show is going to be less than great without you and you're going to be miserable." So I had them send a tape of the first episode that I didn't do. I put it in the VCR and I don't think I got 15 seconds in before I leapt up and slammed it off! It felt like I was watching somebody make out with my girlfriend. I've never seen a West Wing episode in seasons five, six or seven.