“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.”

I grew up in the theatre. It’s where I got my start. Writing a television drama with theatrical dialogue about the theatre is beyond perfection.

I would love for people to think that I am as quick, clever, smart and heroic as the characters that I write, but those characters are characters.

There’s that process of writing it – then you come out of your room into the sunlight, and you now have to complete the circuit and make the connection finally with the audience.

Writers are opposite of athletes, they get better with age

People who don’t know anything tend to make up fake rules, the real rules being considerably more difficult to learn.

That’s a very real feeling – that I don’t have a story to tell. I’m not a pure storyteller. I have a tough time with story.

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

Elite is not a bad word, it’s an aspirational one.

I like workplace shows and White House was a very glamorous workplace to set a show in; it appealed to a sense of romanticism and idealism that I have.

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.

Certainly, last year we did an episode about the census and sampling versus a direct statistic. You just said the word ‘census’, and people fall asleep.

I don’t think I write differently when I’m writing a screenplay, as opposed to a stage play or a teleplay. Maybe if I were in a film class and there was time to think about it, we could point out differences.

People who don’t know anything tend to make up fake rules, the real rules being considerably more difficult to learn.

Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep can play with the boys but there just aren’t that many tour-de-force roles out there for women.

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

Writers are opposite of athletes, they get better with age

You treat people with greatness and greatness will come back to you.

Sometimes I feel sad, but this is not nostalgia, because I don’t want time to come back.

I paint with my back to the world

That’s the beauty of sampling: taking the old sound and recreating it and making something new, or bringing back the old sounds, mixed with some heavy grooves and beats, so people can remember. “Oh, I remember that, back in the day.”

I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and I have no carbons.

When I get back into the city, it doesn’t matter where you plop me down, I have my friends around me and I feel so blessed.

Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.

I do everything I can on a daily basis just so I can have something to give back to the world.