“Conflict, when used as a device, makes for good television and bad journalism.”

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

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.

I can think of no greater disaster to this country than to have the voters of it divide upon religious lines.

We cannot move forward or will not move forward if we are divided.

Today I divide my day between being actor, producer and distributor, and the monotony is broken.

Still, it’s an apt metaphor for our profession. But there’s another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family.

If diving once does not bring you pearls, you need not therefore conclude that the sea is without them.

The physician thinks he is the master, forgetting that God is the Master. God laughs again when two brothers divide their land with a string, saying to each

I see that time divided is never long, and that regularity abridges all things.

The divides are not Islam and western society, the divide is between people who have different values. We must promote connections between people who want to contribute to human values.