When you're writing a novel, you're still telling a story. But you're telling it very differently. It's a craft like anything else.

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.

Where I came from, no one was a writer.

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

In a novel, the only budgetary limitations are that of your imagination.

Listening takes practice, and it takes patience. But I promise, if you listen, your story will be better for it.

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.