“My preference would have been to not go back on the air after 911, at all until the time felt right but that wasn’t an option.”

As an audience member, I like the sound of something that’s been written – I like it to sound written. And then, of course, you can’t do it without the musicians who can play it.

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

Honestly, I don’t try to guess at what most people want. I don’t think I’d guess right, and I just think that that’s not a good recipe for storytelling. I try to write what I like, what I think my friends would like.

The thing I know how to do most is write a play. I came up loving plays and learning about plays and writing plays. I actually feel like an outsider when I’m writing movies and television.

It’s important to remember that, first and foremost, if not only, this is entertainment. ‘The West Wing’ isn’t meant to be good for you.

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

I want to convey that I’m crazy about the Kardashians – but I’m not sure which is which.

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.

The hardest thing for me is getting started. If I’m writing a script, really 90 per cent of it would be just walking around, climbing the walls, just trying to put the idea together. Then the final 10 per cent would be writing it.

If you can socialize from the privacy of your desk at night in a dark room, you can be a smoother, cooler, funnier, sexy, more everything person than you actually are in real life.

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

Josh: So, Toby, it’s election night. What do you say about a country that goes out of its way to protect even those citizens that try to destroy it? Toby: God bless America.

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

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.

Trying to guess what the (mass) audience wants and then trying to satisfy that is usually a bad recipe for getting something good.

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.

I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live.

Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you still had your mother or father at your back, you’d be okay.

Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.

I don’t think any rapper can go back. You can be a car salesman, a bank teller – I mean, really good jobs, and people are still gonna look at you and be like, ‘You used to rap; what happened?’

If we act the truth the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run

If we are all made of God, it is our friends who remind us. We pass the gift of God to them. They pass it back to us when we need it most.

If somebody says no to you, or if you get cut, Michael Jordan was cut his first year, but he came back and he was the best ever. That is what you have to have.

I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world.