“In the best possible scenario, whenever you get notes from people, they’re good notes, and they see things that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise, and they make you a better writer.”

The fact that slavery is written into the Constitution is about as entrenched a form of classism as you could possibly imagine.

And they all have something to offer and making the story better and bringing their vision to what you see in the frame.

I don’t think that Washington is a fundamentally bad or corrupt place.

I refuse to buy a PS3 or Xbox for my home for fear that it might ruin my life.

In politics, it’s very theatrical. There’s a lot of stage craft. The campaign is trying to tell a story that they want people to believe in, and candidates are playing the role, like actors, by a creative personae that people will be attracted to.

Film is much more visual, a scene is typically a lot shorter, you’re dealing with a lot more characters.

The checks and balances is a way to prevent government from either devolving into an autocratic tyranny or an autocratic mob mentality.

If you work hard and play by the rules, you’ll have a better life than your parents did, and your children will have a better life than you did.

In Washington, if you’re a congressman or a senator or the President, you make much more money than the average American, but you’d think that if you were the leader of the free world you’d be making major bank, and you don’t.

I think I would cease to accomplish anything productive, would quickly dispense with all human contact, and would very well end up with a nasty case of arthritis in my over-used digits from constant gameplay.

My jobs on campaigns were pretty low on the totem pole – I was an advance man.

At home I mostly stick to online Scrabble, or chess or Risk – games I find far less addictive than the spectacular games created for consoles these days. But, whenever I get the chance I head over to my friend Kyri’s house to play his PS3.

Every director is different. One of the great things about getting to work with so many directors in one TV series is collaborating with different artistic visions and voices.

You just have to re-wire your brain when you’re shifting from the stage to the screen, or the silver screen or the HD flat screen.

We all experience power struggles in our lives – at the workplace, with our friends, in our love lives. In a way, we’re all politicians.

When you have both parties who will not find ways to compromise, who won’t meet in the middle, you have paralysis. It’s the perversion of idealism.

Notes don’t make music until you learn to insert silence between them.

Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?

If I have a song where I hit some really high notes, I want to try to bring in equivalently low notes somewhere in there.

It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play.

There are no wrong notes.

Don’t worry about playing a lot of notes. Just find one pretty one.

There is more value in placing a flower in a rifle barrel than making war. As Jimi Hendrix used to say, musical notes have more importance than bullets.

No notes. You speak from deep in your heart. It’s easy.