Quotes

I'm very physical. When I'm writing, I'm playing all the parts; I'm saying the lines out loud, and if I get excited about something - which doesn't happen very often when I'm writing, but it's the greatest feeling when it does - I'll be out of the chair and walking around, and if I'm at home, I'll find myself two blocks from my house.

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

If the characters on 'The West Wing' were watching a TV show wherein a character like Trump was leading in the polls, they wouldn't find it believable.

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.

There really isn't a story that you can't tell inside of it. It's very much a clearinghouse for anything that goes on in the world. So you're not at all limited.

A news organization has a much different responsibility. I might not be telling you the whole story. I might not be telling you a story in a manner that is properly sophisticated.

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.

Heroes in drama are people who try hard to reach a virtuous ideal. And whether they succeed or fail really doesn't matter - it's the trying that counts.

I find television, and particularly live television, very romantic: the idea that there is this small group of people, way up high, in a skyscraper in the middle of Manhattan, beaming this signal out into the night.

I'm neither a millennial nor a hipster.

I have all of the Apple products. Everything I've ever written, I've written on a Mac. My first computer, my roommates and I chipped in, and we got that first Macintosh - 128K. It had as much memory as a greeting card that plays music.

I have a big problem with people who glamorize dumbness and demonize education and intellect. And I'm giving a pretty good description of Sarah Palin right now.

Whether it's 'The West Wing' or anything else, my first thought is always, 'What's a good story?'

I do not speak through my characters; it's not a ventriloquist act.

I am uncomfortable talking about the things that I write. It seems unseemly to me. I have no problem at all when I see anybody else talking about the same project, but I feel my work should speak for itself.

My way of getting the best from people on a set is to notice their work, to make every prop master, every seamstress, part of 'The Newsroom' or 'The West Wing' or 'Steve Jobs.'

I'm not sophisticated when it comes to politics, when it comes to journalism.

When I was starting out, William Goldman took me under his wing, and he's still the person I show pages to.

If you lined up 10 writers and asked them to write a movie about Steve Jobs, you'd get 10 very different movies.

I desperately need the love of complete strangers. That's one reason I overtip. I love when skycaps, waiters, and valets are happy to see me.

I do not diminish the incredible symbolic importance of a black man getting elected president. But my euphoria was a smart guy getting elected president. Maybe for the first time in my lifetime we had elected one of the thousand smartest Americans president.

'Steve Jobs' is my seventh movie. I believe, if you added them up, I don't think there is more than a total of 10 minutes that takes place in a person's home. They're all in offices, courtrooms, laboratories, things like that.

First scenes are super-important to me. I'll spend months and months pacing and climbing the walls trying to come up with the first scene. I drive for hours on the freeway.

All my heroes wore coats and ties to work. What happened to men wearing hats? Maybe I should bring back hats.

Everything can be going well, but if I'm not writing, I'm not happy. When I'm writing well, I'm like a different person.