I think that for me, as far as audience expectations and how you manage your anxiety, it helps to keep things in perspective.

Television is a great job for a writer in the way that movies used to be, way before my time. Back when writers in Hollywood were on staff or under contract at any given studio and you'd write movie scripts and then the movies would get made within a few weeks, such that you could be a working writer in the movie business back in the '30s and '40s and '50s and have a hand in writing five or six movies a year that actually got produced. The only thing remotely like that in the 21st century here in Hollywood is working in the TV business.

Having certain limits - not too many, but certain limits on an ability to tell a story - makes us work harder, me and my writers. Sometimes I watch a giant movie with a $250 million budget and I think they feel kind of bloated, and that if they'd been leaner and meaner they might've had better storytelling.

The last thing in the world that I would want to know, in my own life, is when I'm going to pass away.

I stay away from the internet as much as I can. Except for pornography.

I want to believe there's a heaven. But I can't not believe there's a hell.

I think that for me, as far as audience expectations and how you manage your anxiety, it helps to keep things in perspective.