I had never thought of doing television. But my agent wanted me to meet John Wells, who had had a lot of success producing ER and China Beach. The ni….

The real problem with all drugs is that they work. Fantastically. They're great, right up until the moment they kill you..

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..

Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palace….

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

I wrote the show West Wing for the two years before and the two years after 9/11. Suddenly everyone in the world had been through something that our ….

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 love writing. I'm not particularly comfortable in the actual world - I'm much more comfortable on the page. So if I could have a life where I could….

The Monica Lewinsky scandal was happening at the very time I was writing the West Wing pilot and it was hard, at least for Americans, to look at the ….

Socializing on the internet is to socializing what reality TV is to reality..

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 watchi….

One of the biggest challenges in the past for me in working on the networks was that audiences have grown accustomed to television being something th….

Perhaps something like Facebook couldn't have been invented by somebody who goes out five nights a week and has a ton of friends and makes friends re….

Make no mistake about it, you are dumb. You’re a group of incredibly well-educated dumb people. I was there. We all were there. You’re barely fun….

Don't ever forget that you're a citizen of this world, and there are things you can do to lift the human spirit, things that are easy, things that ar….

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 managea….

People don't live their lives in a series of scenes that form a dramatic narrative, they don't speak in dialogue, they're not lit by a cinematographe….

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..

To use a basketball metaphor, West Wing cast was a group that liked to pass as much as they liked to shoot..

As an audience member, I like the sound of something that's been written - I like it to sound written. And then, of course, you can't do it without t….

It's a combination of life being unpredictable, and you being super dumb..