At home I mostly stick to online Scrabble, or chess or Risk - games I find far less addictive than the spectacular games created for consoles these days. But, whenever I get the chance I head over to my friend Kyri’s house to play his PS3.

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.

My jobs on campaigns were pretty low on the totem pole - I was an advance man.

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.

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.

Film is much more visual, a scene is typically a lot shorter, you’re dealing with a lot more characters, a lot more locations and you’re able to rely on things that you just can never do on the stage.

I don't think that Washington is a fundamentally bad or corrupt place.