I'm not always successful, but I take my job as a storyteller very seriously and want to make sure the audience has as much fun watching it as I am creating it.

Anything that happens on any show is a plot contrivance because that's just storytelling.

I'm very hard on myself when it comes to writing.

We were all inspired by him as an actor and his iconography and thought, if we get somebody like Laurence Fishburne, we can tell a much more sophisticated, complicated version of Jack Crawford than we'd seen before as this large and in-charge and in-control guy, who is unflappable.

Anybody who is capable of doing terrible things, you don't want them out in the world, but you can't help but respect their ingenuity and their savvy and their intelligence as they go about their dastardly deeds.

We only really, deeply consider what our life is when we're faced with mortality on some level.

Molly Shannon such an interesting actress that portrays vulnerability and danger at the same time, because she seems brittle in that role.