You have to realize that people who bother to log on to anything and talk about a television show is a very specific fraction of the audience. It's not the general audience, so you can't get too crazy listening to just that. That's not representative, but they are the most dedicated.

I like interacting with fans and I like hearing what they say, but you have to take it all with a grain of salt.

I think people are screw-ups, and even our greatest heroes are deeply flawed human beings. People make bad decisions for all the wrong reasons, and then somehow they'll do the right thing, and then somehow they'll save somebody, or they'll be compassionate. Horrible people can do wonderful things, and wonderful people can do horrible things.

When I finally got my break in TV, as a staff writer, I always wanted to be at the top of that pyramid. I always wanted to make the decisions. I always wanted to be the one that was saying, "This is what the show is, and this is what the show is not. This is where we're going. It's going to be this kind of series." It was just something I always had my eye on, when I started in the business.

The flower inside the fruit that is both its parent and its child. Decadent as ancestors. The portal and that which passes. Nuclear devices activated, and the machine keeps pushing time through the cogs, like paste into strings into paste again, and only the machine keeps using time to make time to make time. And when the machine stops, time was an illusion that we created free will.

I'm always looking for vacation. I'm always trying to step away from it to watch movies. I'm always trying to carve out free time for myself. But, I love it. I don't think I've ever not wanted to run a show. When I have a show, I'm always really excited. I always enjoy the process.

Now I know that if I'm in a fight or a big argument with executives or the studio or whoever, and it's getting to a point where it's starting to get bad, I don't have to have the fear of, "Am I strong enough to see this through? Would I really make a stand here? Would I really quit over this issue?" And I know in my heart that there is a place where I would walk away. I don't have to make it about my ego. I don't have to make it about whether I'm being strong enough or tough enough.