Everything I've written up to now, hasn't had anything to do with my life really.

I think there's a lot of shame in American race relations. There's a lot of suppressed guilt that lashes itself out still. I see that all the time, and whereas opposed to sort of trying to address the issue in an up-front way, they're attacking and thus perpetuating the problem thinking that they're being sophisticated and post-racial, when, in fact, they're being completely regressive.

I still recognized for television. Buffy is 70 percent, Gilmore Girls is 30 percent, and then Mad Men. If it's a mother/daughter, it's definitely Gilmore Girls. They usually say, "We always watch it together, and we feel like we're the Gilmore girls." I've heard that like, 5,000 times.

I had written four scripts before I wrote Recount. Each one progressed my career a little bit, but I didn't make a dime off any of them. Recount was the first thing I sold, and I actually sold it as a pitch to HBO. They bought it as a pitch, which was a miracle. I thought, "Wow, this could be the last time I'll be paid to write a script again, which would be too bad because that was an amazing experience I just had."

Usually if a scene's really hard to write, I just don't write it. Nothing's coming to mind.

People that work at the White House, they stay forever and love the job. Someone asked me, "Was there really a butler that was there for 40 years?" I said, "No, they're all there for 40 years."

It seems to me that our presidential elections have turned more into a popularity contest than a real analysis about who really should be President of the United States.