I'm sick of girls who don't know how to high-five.

It's nice that HBO is in business with the audience and not with the advertisers. There's a difference.

You're going to fall down, but the world doesn't care how many times you fall down, as long as it's one fewer than the numbers of times you get back up.

Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.

Stupid people surround themselves with smart people. Smart people surround themselves with smart people who disagree with them.

An artist’s job is to captivate… if we stumble into truth, we got lucky.

Rule of storytelling: When a character is shoved against a wall, shove them against a wall harder.

A friend is somebody who says the same things to your face that they would say if you're not in the room.

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.

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

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.

Fiction has the ability to show us what we don’t know and what doesn’t happen.

We men of this age are rotten with book-lore and with a yearning for the past.

The world is ruled by force, not by opinion; but opinion uses force.

Their friendship was like a wilted bunch of flowers that she insisted on topping up with water. Why not let it die instead?

Income inequality and wage stagnation finally took their place among the principal moral issues of our time.

All I knew when I moved to Nashville was that I wanted to make music in whatever shape and form I could.

I try to always stretch myself to fit the characters that have been presented.

The biggest threat to this country isn't the Russians. It's our own inability to make democracy or capitalism work.

Apathy borders upon folly.

I'm pretty hard on myself. Every now and again I'll go on my IMDB or update my resume and I'm like, "man, I've done a lot of work."