Authenticity is an alignment between your beliefs, your desires and your choices in the world. Desires change throughout the course of a life, but agreement between ideals, aspirations and deeds is key to a life of peace, happiness and success.

Most of TV works this way: You try to get something up and running, and once you do, you just try to keep it going, because there's a lot of money involved.

There came this point where I sat down with all my notebooks and I had to start to write, when I thought: this whole notion of writing for the person who understands nothing, the average reader ... He has to die! I can't have him in my head. And so the person I started writing for was the homicide detective.

TV writers live life of well-paid, specialty prostitutes. We have a very special skill set and we occupy one of the higher floors in the bordello that is writing. We do a very particular job for a very select clientele.

Those...who insist that there are some moral limits that they will not violate, are forever surprising themselves.

A TV show can't hold people and institutions to account like good journalism can.

Barack Obama's understanding of what the drug war had cost the country was meaningful. And very quietly in his second term, he and Eric Holder did make some adjustments in terms of the use of the Department of Justice, on the federal level. You saw ratcheting back of drug prohibition, and mass incarceration. You also saw, on the part of some certain states, a realization that they followed the war on drugs to a useless place, that they were only doing damage to communities, and bankrupting budgets with prison construction.