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.

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

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.

Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That's my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet.

The Monica Lewinsky scandal was happening at the very time I was writing the West Wing pilot and it was hard, at least for Americans, to look at the White House and think of anything but a punch line. Plus a show about politics, a show that took place in Washington, had just never worked before in American television. So the show was delayed for a year.

The stuff that I write doesn't work very well as background music. You have to watch it from beginning to end and pay attention as if you were watching a play.

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