You've got to honor your relationship with your audience - that they sit down because they want to be entertained. And that doesn't mean you can't provoke them and antagonize them and challenge them in the course of the entertainment as long as you keep the entertainment part of the equation alive.

When I really have to push and grope and scratch and claw to make a story work, that's a telltale sign that maybe something conceptually isn't right.

If you interview people or friends who work with me, they would say I'm private or internal or don't emote a lot. Yet I do it every day for 10 million people. I just don't do it for the 30 people I'm in the room with.

Some of my high school teachers did remind me that I had an excellent imagination when it came to making up excuses.

I never thought of myself as a writer.

People are out of their home on a Saturday night or they're at the movies or they're at dinner and a lot of the people who flip on the television are doing just that. They may have never seen your show before and you can't count on to your audience to be there week in and week out.

In retrospect, I think it's a plus, because now we've been able to go back and spend extra time on each of those episodes and make them better.