“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.”

She’s a person; the doctor pronounces her dead, not the news.

I’ve never met anyone who has said, “My goal is to make America mediocre.” That’s a kind of hard-right conservative fallacy.

I’m a playwright. All I care about is the play being good.

I think that if I couldn’t write, I would be unemployable.

My resting pulse as a writer is writing idealistically and romantically; aspirationally. My taste lies in quixotic heroes.

It’s populated by people who, by and large, have terrific communication skills. Every day is an extraordinary day. For me, it was just a great area for storytelling.

To use a basketball metaphor, West Wing cast was a group that liked to pass as much as they liked to shoot.

Any time you get two people in a room who disagree about anything, the time of day, there is a scene to be written. That’s what I look for.

Writing anything, it sorta starts the way you’d build a castle at the beach. You’re just taking your hands and you’re mounting up sand.

This is a time for serious people, Bob, and your fifteen minutes are up.

I’m terribly afraid of failure. When your identity is wrapped up in writing and you’ve written something that doesn’t work, it’s a tough pill to swallow.

If you feel that strongly about something, you have an obligation to try and change my mind.

Roxy Sorkin, your father just won the Academy Award. I’m going to have to insist on some respect from your guinea pig.

The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one – America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.

I grew up in the theatre. It’s where I got my start. Writing a television drama with theatrical dialogue about the theatre is beyond perfection.

I would love for people to think that I am as quick, clever, smart and heroic as the characters that I write, but those characters are characters.

One of the things that I found very confronting in my early working life was that people thought I was some sensitive doe-eyed lovelorn boy, because they’d seen me do that a couple of times. What tends to happen is you get a run of similar roles.

The Blind Boys are truly the deepest well of American musical heritage you can discover.

A dog does not live as long as a man and this natural law is the fount of many tears. If boy and puppy might grow to manhood and doghood together, and together grow old.

When you’re a boy your life can be measured out as a series of uncomfortable conversations reluctantly initiated by adults in an effort to tell you things that you either already know or really don’t want to know.

Get money, still get money, boy, no matter by what means.

Just previous to the birth of my little son, my mind gave way and my child was born in the asylum for the insane at Stockton, Cal. My boy was buried there.

I’m not a boy band kind of girl. I like hip-hop, I like R&B.

I grew up with the Blind Boys’ music. My family owns a music store in Claremont, California, called The Claremont Folk Music Center. I grew up with a heavy diet of gospel, folk, and blues because those are kind of the cornerstones of traditional American music.