If you work hard and play by the rules, you'll have a better life than your parents did, and your children will have a better life than you did.

In the best possible scenario, whenever you get notes from people, they're good notes, and they see things that you wouldn't have seen otherwise, and they make you a better writer.

Is self-interest a bad thing? We want our leaders to be pure and good, but at the same time we want them to be effective, and to be effective you often have to be ruthless and not bound by ideology or the same morals that we pretend to hold ourselves to.

It's a rough and tumble game whenever power is involved - people's ambitions, their desires, their competitive spirit will often push them to play outside the rules. It's dramatic, it's interesting, and I think it's something we can all identify with to a degree.

When you're creating new roles out of scratch in my opinion working with the actors is a great asset. You can learn a lot from that.

In politics, it's very theatrical. There’s a lot of stage craft. The campaign is trying to tell a story that they want people to believe in, and candidates are playing the role, like actors, by a creative personae that people will be attracted to.

The fact that slavery is written into the Constitution is about as entrenched a form of classism as you could possibly imagine.