“Writers are opposite of athletes, they get better with age”

People who don’t know anything tend to make up fake rules, the real rules being considerably more difficult to learn.

Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep can play with the boys but there just aren’t that many tour-de-force roles out there for women.

We live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns.

As a dramatist, you’re looking for points of friction.

What’s interesting, is that I’ve found that the more accomplished a director is, the more secure they are in giving direction that sounds incredibly unsophisticated.

Toby: All right. It couldn’t have gone far, right? Sam: No. Toby: Somewhere in this building…is our talent.

President Bartlet: There’s a delegation of cardiologists having their pictures taken in the Blue Room. You wouldn’t think you could find a group of people more arrogant than the fifteen of us, but there they are, right upstairs in the Blue Room.

It seems to me that more and more we’ve come to expect less and less from each other, and I think that should change.

The guy who wins the Oscar for Best Actor has a much higher bar to clear than the woman who wins best actress.

You know, one of the things I like about this world, or at least I like about the way we’re presenting this world, is these issues are terribly complicated – not nearly as black and white as we’re led to believe.

It wouldn’t kill you to watch a film or pick up a newspaper once in a while.

And a wheat thin the size of Lake Tahoe.

Only criminals and adulterers should have to hide who they are.

Toby Zeigler: There’s literally no one in the world I don’t hate right now.

When I feel that something I’m writing is going well, everything in my life is good and the things in my life that aren’t good are completely manageable. If it’s not going well, Miss America could be standing there in a swimsuit handing me a nobel price and I wouldn’t be happy about it

When I write something, I want the best director to direct it. And that’s not going to be me.