I love David Fincher - even though it was just two scenes, I loved the way we worked and could tell by the way he was shooting it that this was going to be an affective movie to say the least.

One of the great things about the old days of television, 10 years ago, or 15 years ago, was that it was water cooler television. People would communally watch the same hour. People used to tell us all the time, we turn off the phones, we put the kids to bed and that one hour is uninterrupted. Then, the next day at the water cooler, they all talk about it.

The political nonsense of network television and the culture of a set and all the problems that that can create, I can take. I can't take betraying the truth of what I'm doing. It cuts to the absolute core of everything that I do in the craft, in this world that I live in.

Families are like puzzles. They fit together in a certain way, and if one piece is missing, it throws everything off.

I remember the day Richard Nixon won in 1968. That was a time that seemed certain to bring about long awaited seismic change in America. But events of tragic proportion took us on a turn. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were suddenly dead.

We are often too late with our brilliance. We are on time delay. The only instant gratification comes in the form of potato chips. The rest will find us by surprise somewhere down the road maybe as we sleep and dream of other things.

I didn't expect NBC would be at all thrilled about me, because the year before the West Wing I had rejected a pilot at the last minute and got them very upset. I ended up not coming to the casting - in fact it happened four different times because I just wasn't convinced that I wanted to do television.