David Mandel Quotes

I was a Fry & Laurie fan, I was a Blackadder fan, I was a House fan and he [ Hugh Laurie]s a pleasure.

Here's one of the great things, and I may have said this somewhere, so forgive me. Curb ideas are not Veep ideas. I definitely have my Curb idea list that I've been carrying around for the last five years.

I do think that's one of the strengths of the show is every year there's sort of the giant rock gets thrown into the stream and Selina has to figure out how to get around the rock. It's in Veep's DNA, whether anyone realized it or not, to constantly be changing.

I love Veep so I felt like there was a lot I could bring to it.

Veep is my priority. Veep is my home, but I have nothing but obviously, good thoughts and really want Curb to be Curb. So anything I can do, as long as Veep is not getting hurt, I guess is the answer.

I'd like to give every member of our cast a best supporting comedy Emmy.

It's gratifying that people are watching that [Veep] intently and that hard. So it's been really nice and it's been really fun.

I think the fact that they all served under her as a president is a strong pull. Here's a perfect example: George Stephanopoulos. He has a full on career in the media of his own, and yet on some days he's still George Stephanopoulos who worked for the Clintons. As much as he's done on his own, he's still in the Clinton orbit and it comes back up all the time.

I have been able to watch the Clintons and The Clinton Foundation; Al Gore and what he did post-losing the whole Florida thing. There's a grand tradition of a lot of interesting stuff that happens to these post-presidents.

If that had been my last show last night, you'd be talking to the new guy, asking the same questions that I got.

I think it's a fun thing, and perhaps maybe very so slightly as an American, it's a slightly different thing that they didn't do as much of when the show was 100 percent written by Brits just because I'm not sure they were quite as familiar with some of these little moments in our government system.

I enjoy biographies and whatnot. I'm also a fan of presidential libraries. I've visited quite a few of them, especially the more modern ones.

I'm certainly never going to say that someone is prettier than Julia Louis-Dreyfus, but someone who would make her crazy for being young and good-looking.

There's a grand tradition of a lot of interesting stuff that happens to these post-presidents. Especially in this day and age where you leave office in your 50s and you can live another 40 years, easily. That's a lot of time.

All of a sudden, making a Spanish-American War joke. I think you sort of had to go to probably to an American high school to have remembered that.

I'm a little bit of a news political junkie, a little bit of a reader of history.

I was born in 1970 and I got to see a little bit of [Richard] Nixon's attempts at redefining himself. I saw [Gerald] Ford.

I saw [Ronald] Reagan. I've watched Jimmy Carter and his selflessness, getting involved in things like votes in African countries, but also putting his foot right into the whole Israel-Palestine crisis. Sometimes into places where people are going, "Why are you doing that?" .

One of the cool things, obviously there's 'Scandal,' 'House of Cards,' there was 'West Wing.' Other than that Jack Lemmon/James Garner movie about ex-presidents, no one's ever done anything in this area, whereas a lot of times, we do a story where someone goes, "Oh, yeah, they did someone sleeping with a Secret Service agent on 'House of Cards.'"

I think that's part of being a comedy writer. You have to be confident. If you're sitting around worrying about, like, oh my God, what are people going to think, then you're not writing comedy. You have to write what makes you laugh, and then the world hopefully laughs as well.

My first instinct was Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) cannot be president of the United States. She needs to lose because it's the thing she wants most on the planet Earth.

That is what we have been feinting towards for a year of our lives: pretending like it was going to happen, acting like it was going to happen, and making you think it was going to happen. I like to work from the back forward.

As for being on Twitter, I enjoy it tremendously, and it is wonderfully overwhelming to see people not just digging it and liking it.

What I loved about it was language-wise it wasn't that finely-tuned-perfect-insult-for-the-perfect-situation that sometimes we try and do on Veep.