“I’ll get cast occasionally as sort of the jerk version of myself, and I have fun doing that. But it’s really better for everyone if I stay behind the camera.”

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.

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.

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

There are television critics, movie critics, and theater critics too who I like and who I follow and I get genuinely bummed when they don’t like something that I’ve written because I usually agree with them.

A hero would die for his country, but he’d much rather live for it.

I don’t believe there are two sides to every argument. I think the facts are the center. And watching the news abandon the facts in favor of “fairness” is what’s troubling to me.

I consider plot a necessary intrusion on what I really want to do, which is write snappy dialogue. But when I’m writing, the way the words sound is as important to me as what they mean.

If I get an idea for a series that I really like, I’m sure I won’t be able to resist coming back and doing it.

I have a lot of respect for people who are great at ad-libbing, and for writers and directors who are able to create a scene in which that works.

Just to clarify the division of labor on the show, I write the show and Alan [Poul] does everything else.

Conflict, when used as a device, makes for good television and bad journalism.

There are no Asian movie stars

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

Never argue with a drunk or a fool.

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

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

I thought it would be sexier if it were in-camera cuts. So I did that.

We’re so conditioned to the syntax of the camera that we don’t realize that we are running on only half the visual alphabet…

All those images are being produced basically the same way, through a lens and a camera.

I am semi-ambivalent about being on camera – sort of low-key. I don’t like being on camera stuff that much.

The camera will never compete with the brush and the palette, until such time as photographs can be taken in Heaven or Hell.

If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well.

I remember weeping behind the camera, because I was so moved by the way they connected.

… photography, like all camera-made images such as film and video, effaces the marks of its making (and maker) at the click of a shutter. A photograph appears to be self-generated – as though it had created itself.