“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.”

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.

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.

The guy who wins the Oscar for Best Actor has a much higher bar to clear than the woman who wins best actress.

You know, one of the things I like about this world, or at least I like about the way we’re presenting this world, is these issues are terribly complicated – not nearly as black and white as we’re led to believe.

It wouldn’t kill you to watch a film or pick up a newspaper once in a while.

And a wheat thin the size of Lake Tahoe.

Only criminals and adulterers should have to hide who they are.

Toby Zeigler: There’s literally no one in the world I don’t hate right now.

When I feel that something I’m writing is going well, everything in my life is good and the things in my life that aren’t good are completely manageable. If it’s not going well, Miss America could be standing there in a swimsuit handing me a nobel price and I wouldn’t be happy about it

When I write something, I want the best director to direct it. And that’s not going to be me.

The stuff that I write doesn’t work very well as background music. You have to watch it from beginning to end and pay attention as if you were watching a play.

The downside to series television is that the schedule is ferocious. It constantly feels like you have a midterm due that you haven’t started yet.

There’s a great tradition in storytelling that’s thousands of years old, telling stories about kings and their palaces, and that’s really what I wanted to do.

I have never supported amnesty, and I led the fight against Chuck Schumer’s gang of eight amnesty legislation in the Senate.

One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat…nor make love for eight hours…

I later spent… five to eight months in hospitals in New Jersey, always on an involuntary basis, and always attempting a legal argument for release.

There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.

It’s a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can’t eat for eight hours; he can’t drink for eight hours; he can’t make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.

It just seems like we get more popular every eight years or so. For some reason, it becomes cool to like Motorhead again.

I was born January 6, 1937, eight years after Wall Street crashed and two years before John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the plight of a family during the Great Depression.

We shot ‘High School Musical’ in eight weeks. I spent longer rehearsing for ‘Hairspray’ than filming ‘High School Musical’.