“I’ve never met anyone who has said, “My goal is to make America mediocre.” That’s a kind of hard-right conservative fallacy.”

I’m terribly afraid of failure. When your identity is wrapped up in writing and you’ve written something that doesn’t work, it’s a tough pill to swallow.

The hardest thing for me is getting started. If I’m writing a script, really 90 per cent of it would be just walking around, climbing the walls, just trying to put the idea together. Then the final 10 per cent would be writing it.

If you can socialize from the privacy of your desk at night in a dark room, you can be a smoother, cooler, funnier, sexy, more everything person than you actually are in real life.

Toby: All right. It couldn’t have gone far, right? Sam: No. Toby: Somewhere in this building…is our talent.

Josh: So, Toby, it’s election night. What do you say about a country that goes out of its way to protect even those citizens that try to destroy it? Toby: God bless America.

If you feel that strongly about something, you have an obligation to try and change my mind.

Writing anything, it sorta starts the way you’d build a castle at the beach. You’re just taking your hands and you’re mounting up sand.

Trying to guess what the (mass) audience wants and then trying to satisfy that is usually a bad recipe for getting something good.

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.

America, like all nations, has to renounce war.

Everyone across America is tightening their belts. The only place it hasn’t happened is D.C.

We obviously have to honor the commitments that have been made to the people who are already retired or near the retirement age. But we need to tell the truth about the fact that when we set the retirement age at age 65 in America, life expectancy was only 62.

It is so great to sleep in safe, glorious, beautiful America. I just cannot get over it.

Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall with a country attached.

From what we’ve heard about George W., he has a lot issues that he wants to run on. They’re positive. They’re good. He thinks he’s got a good vision for America.

. . . learning never ends, and as we enter the next century, it will be more and more important for all Americans to be lifelong learners. . . . every one of us can contribute in some way to a better-educated America.

The citizens of America expect more. They deserve and they want more than a recital of problems.