If Nixon were a Republican senator today, he would have been primaried out.

The first thing you've got to do is know your craft, and then you can do something else with it.

I am one of those people who thrive on deadlines. Nothing brings on inspiration more readily than desperation.

When I was growing up, we learned our history almost as lives of the saints. And it came as a shock, "Oh, Jefferson had slaves?" It always comes as a shock to us that elevation to the White House didn't somehow cleanse them of all their deep character flaws.

I think Nixon says a lot about those times. It was possibly hard, in the '90s and early 2000s to understand the grip of fear that communism had on the country in the 1950s and 1960s - a fear Nixon rode like a endless great wave on the Pacific to high office. I'm sure, though there's no evidence of it, one of the things that rankled him down deep was that it was called McCarthyism and not Nixonism.

You're not just looking for laughs, but you're trying to do the characters first, and then the laughs come afterwards.

The theater business is very much about "Hey, if you want our big blockbuster at Christmas time, you'll play our piece of crap in April."