One of the biggest challenges in the past for me in working on the networks was that audiences have grown accustomed to television being something that keeps you company-background music, something that you have on while you're flipping through a magazine, cooking dinner, talking on the phone, putting the kids to bed.

The downside to series television is that the schedule is ferocious. It constantly feels like you have a midterm due that you haven't started yet.

Never argue with a drunk or a fool.

I'll get cast occasionally as sort of the jerk version of myself, and I have fun doing that. But it's really better for everyone if I stay behind the camera.

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.

I think that if I couldn't write, I would be unemployable.

Film doesn't have to worry. Movies are awesome. There's no war going on, theaters aren't going to lose.