It's important to remember that, first and foremost, if not only, this is entertainment. 'The West Wing' isn't meant to be good for you.

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.

Nani’s allegiance is to her angerandangerruns deeper than blood and skin.It’s set in boneand bone, once broken, neverheals the same.

[Truman] didn’t want to fight the guy, whatever he was—alien, vampyr or douchebag.

To be heroic may mean nothing more than this then, to stand in the face of the status quo, in the face of an easy collapse into the madness of an increasingly chaotic world and represent another way.

Behind the transient reality, there is something else. It is a deeper, more permanent and unchanging reality that we Buddhists call nirvana.

Getting an unsophisticated client was the golden prize. The quickest way to make money on Wall Street is to take the most sophisticated product and try to sell it to the least sophisticated client.

Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything.

And the wind plays on those great sonorous harps, the shrouds and masts of ships.

City people make most of the fuss about the charms of country life.

It's nice that you spend a day with your mother,' she said. "Children should do it more often.

It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works and has his being.