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

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.

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.

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.

Writers are opposite of athletes, they get better with age

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.

… Grateful Dead – that’s it !! … nobody in the band liked it, (the name) I didn’t like it, either, but it got around that that was one of the candidates for our new name, and everyone else said, ‘Yeah, that’s great.’

I believe I would rather have Stieglitz like something – anything I had done – than anyone else I know.

The dialect part of it comes into play, but nothing like the differentiation that language sets up, for example.

I don’t like watching golf on TV. I’d rather play.

There is no gambling like politics.

I guess you can say I always liked to take chances.

I’ve thought sometimes about what I like about football, and it’s playing together.

It’s not like I’m starting out with $500 a pull or $1,000 a pull. I go in there and play $25, and if I win, I play $100s.