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

Is self-interest a bad thing? We want our leaders to be pure and good, but at the same time we want them to be effective, and to be effective you often have to be ruthless and not bound by ideology or the same morals that we pretend to hold ourselves to.

When you’re creating new roles out of scratch in my opinion working with the actors is a great asset. You can learn a lot from that.

It’s a rough and tumble game whenever power is involved – people’s ambitions, their desires, their competitive spirit will often push them to play outside the rules. It’s dramatic, it’s interesting, and I think it’s something we can all identify with to a degree.

A lot more locations and you’re able to rely on things that you just can never do on the stage.

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.

Especially in recent years, the more and more we understand what we are doing, the more we have the science to tell us what we’re doing, the fact that we continue to do it without taking steps to address it strikes me as, among many other things, irreverent in an extreme.

Psychologically, you have to have confidence in yourself and this confidence should be based on fact.

The will of God is exactly what we would do if we knew all the facts.

If comedy is about surprises, about tension, there’s a lot of tension and surprise there, in the fact that people are expecting this to be natural.

They thought they were Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall. In fact, they were more like Tom and Jerry

The really authentic thing about humor is that anyone can pretend to be serious. Anyone who’s ever had a job – in fact, we’re pretending to be serious now, more or less.

The successful memoirist [blogger] respects facts, uses them accurately, rigorously represses the human impulse to lie or embellish, but knows that truth is both different from facts and greater than facts, and not always their sum.

Complicated lives and heaps of possessions don’t necessarily bring happiness; in fact, they can bring the opposite.