What is absolutely true is that any good [Television] series has a specific voice. And I think that voice is almost exclusively the domain of the executive producer. . . . As a staff writer you're not being called upon to be the great creative person. You're sort of called upon to understand the characters and their voices and put them through certain paces.

When you do a TV show, the cumulative intimacy you develop with the audience through your characters is pretty profound. It may be the most profound storytelling there is, because the character gets to live and roll around in the audience's mind week after week.

I feel like a centrist, an issue-specific person. I'm pretty conservative fiscally and pretty liberal on social issues.

We're not allowed to carry out harsh interrogations anymore, but we're allowed to fly over somebody's village, without due process, and kill them all?

I guess I've always been an aspiring novelist. I went to Princeton and wrote a novel for my thesis.

In a novel, the relationship between writer and reader is such a pure one.

Traditionally, people have been adapting novels and short stories forever. Now, they're doing it simultaneously, with an eye towards writing the movie before the novel has even come out or been finished. It's a function of this hyper-accelerated society we live in, where everyone is trying to short circuit the process.