Just put your best foot forward and hope for the best. You also have to acknowledge that you're going to make mistakes.

I stand by the Lost finale. It's the story that we wanted to tell, and we told it. No excuses. No apologies. I look back on it as fondly as I look back on the process of writing the whole show. And while I'll always care what you think, I can't be a slave to it anymore. Here's why: I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really … I was alive.

I think that we, as writers, get excited by risk. When we are feeling comfortable and familiar, I wouldn't say that we get bored, but the energy in the room gets flat. When we're most excited and when the show is the most fun, it's when we're duking things out.

There is no suspense in inevitability.

One of the things I've learned is there's no lesson to be learned. You have to resign yourself to the fact that mistakes are going to be made at any time in the creative process.

I've always been really interested in the future, and I feel like all of the movies that I've been exposed to, over the course of the last 20 to 30 years, have shown me a future that I don't really want to be living in.

If you're constantly hamstrung by worry that people aren't going to like it, you can't do your job.