“Well, I must tell you I write the scripts very close to the bone. So I’m writing episode seven now and couldn’t tell you what happens in episode eight.”

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.

There’s that process of writing it – then you come out of your room into the sunlight, and you now have to complete the circuit and make the connection finally with the audience.

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.

That’s a very real feeling – that I don’t have a story to tell. I’m not a pure storyteller. I have a tough time with story.

I’m a registered Republican, I only seem liberal because I believe that hurricanes are caused by high barometric pressure and not gay marriage.

Elite is not a bad word, it’s an aspirational one.

I like workplace shows and White House was a very glamorous workplace to set a show in; it appealed to a sense of romanticism and idealism that I have.

Certainly, last year we did an episode about the census and sampling versus a direct statistic. You just said the word ‘census’, and people fall asleep.

I don’t think I write differently when I’m writing a screenplay, as opposed to a stage play or a teleplay. Maybe if I were in a film class and there was time to think about it, we could point out differences.

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.

Eight hours of work, eight hours of play, eight hours of sleep – eight hours a day!

This could be a whole life,” she thought. “You work eight hours a day covering wires to earn money to buy food and to pay for a place to sleep so that you can keep living to come back to cover more wires. Some people are born and kept living just to come to this.

As I small child and hearing all the stories about him I, of course, looked up to him as some kind of miracle. Then I got to eight years old and suddenly I was taller than [Bernie Ecclestone].

I say that the art of sculpture is eight times as great as any other art based on drawing, because a statue has eight views and they must all be equally good.

As attorney general, Ive had some connection with just about every important public issue in the last eight years in Kentucky.

The Greek in me wanted to know what it felt like to pull an oar. The intellectual wondered about how to get eight individuals to move to the same beat. The athlete wanted to check what has been described as the ultimate workout.

We would scoff at the idea of a nice studio. “Why would you want to go to a nice studio? Oh wow, they have really expensive gear. Ooh, that’s really fancy. Well we’ve got an eight-track. We’ve got it going on here.”

I started publishing stories in small magazines early on, but after seven or eight or nine years you feel like you need a little more than that to show for your efforts.