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.

It's a combination of life being unpredictable, and you being super dumb.

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

Writers are opposite of athletes, they get better with age

It was hard saying goodbye to the character and harder saying goodbye to the actor. When rumours started going around that Rob Lowe might be leaving I got an email from Josh Malina asking if I'd be interested in an actor who was cheaper and not as good looking. I wrote back, "Always", and that was that.

There's that process of writing it - then you come out of your room into the sunlight, and you now have to complete the circuit and make the connection finally with the audience.

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.