Everyone in Hollywood who is successful becomes less successful at some point. I'm just trying to delay that fall for as long as I can.

Obviously there are different standards and practices that are allowed on cable versus network. You just have to embrace what your network is going to allow.

I'm very humble in terms of knowing that television is an extraordinary collaborative medium and that one person alone cannot make a great TV show.

I'm perfectly happy to color within the network lines when I have to.

TV is just such a fast-moving medium that you do what you can do, and what you can't do, you don't worry about too much.

There are certain economics involved in making a network TV show that you want to amortize the costs of that, so the more episodes you make, the cheaper they all are individually.

Nothing makes me happier than to have a smart person tell me why the show is smart, especially if I didn't intend that. I tend to be a very instinctual writer, and I don't plot shows out like, "This is my thesis and this is how I'm going to subtly sneak my thesis into this episode." I just approach it from, "We know these characters well, here are the situations that they're in, now how would they behave? What would the consequences be?" And it's always fun to see how people interpret that and dissect it afterward, and make me and the other writers seem probably smarter than we really are.