The great thing about writing jokes for President Obama is that he is not afraid to tell jokes that are actually funny - and not just funny for a politician.

'Veep' is a great satire of democracy.

There is that definition of leadership that says, 'Leadership is convincing people to do things that they otherwise wouldn't have done because you've made them believe it's the right thing to do.' And a great speech can do that.

One of the lessons of 2016 is to spend less time worrying about what will happen and more time worrying about what we want to happen.

We have a lot of really boring, silly, stupid politics. We need people to point that out.

Washington is filled with people making other people's arguments for money.

More and more people support equality for their gay friends and neighbors, and that is not because the 'Duck Dynasty' guy almost lost his show.

Life tests our willingness, in ways large and small, to tell the truth.

One of the hardest lessons of childhood is reckoning with the instability of the world.

The Internet didn't cause Donald Trump, and it certainly can't solve Donald Trump.

We don't want people to be afraid of saying something interesting on the off chance it's taken the wrong way.

Everybody hates Congress; even Congress hates Congress.

Humor connects us, especially in politics. It's a way of surprising one another with shared context and experience.

A great speech can make you remember something about what you believe, about who you are, about who you want to be. It's rare when that kind of thing happens. But it is important, and it is real.

Because the speech is an argument, and a great speech makes an argument well, the act of making that argument is a really important part of how the policy process coalesces and solidifies both for the candidate and also the people serving that candidate.

Republicans paint everything that Democrats have been for as socialism, too far to the left, as extreme, and it didn't matter how moderated it was; it didn't matter that Obamacare started out as a compromise. You might as well say what you're actually for and show what you really are.

I had a really fun career in TV right after I left politics.

The conversation on Twitter and the way people are in the world are very different.

I am a deeply awkward person; I am not cool.

It's so unfair that Barack Obama, this cool, charming guy, also has good comedic timing.

I don't know the venture fund terms. I don't know what a seed round is. I want nothing to do with it.

People say that making money in the content-media game is hard, and that is just, like, not my experience. It's super-confusing, 'cause everyone's like, 'Oh, how are you going to monetize?' It's easy: just start talking, and then money rolls in.

You look at what animates Democratic voters; you look at what animates Democratic politicians: it's health care. It's increasingly climate. It is wages and economic issues. It's issues around reproductive freedom and criminal justice reform and inequality.

We've been dealing with censorship around multimedia, about multinational companies and the content they create, for a very long time.

Every technology company should have a red button somewhere in the headquarters where, if they realize they've caused more societal harm than they expected and done more harm than good, they press the button, and the company dissolves instantly.

I'm famously humble.

Making '1600 Penn' was really fun, and I learned a lot.

'Pod Save America' will be a kingmaker.

One thing that is for certain is that there are tens of millions of people who are deeply unsatisfied with the way they get their political news.

Little things had to go wrong for Donald Trump to become president: Comey, emails, all that stuff. Big things did make Trump possible. Big, cultural, political, economic forces opened the door to someone like Trump.

Nationalism is not that hard. It's not that hard to incite people against another, and it's also - and this is the harder thing: Democrats have, and the challenge we have all the time, is we believe in governing and governance and trying to find middle ground.

Humor is a way of saying we're all seeing the same ridiculous, absurd, infuriating things together.

I'm motivated by a bottomless well of anger. It's a joke, but I don't think I don't mean it.

I had never really planned on being a speechwriter.

It's certainly true that presidents have confidantes who rise above what you would call just staff.

There's only so much mistrust we can take before things get much worse.

It's always been a dream of mine to write comedy and be creative.

I would like to be able to write in my own voice.

I personally believe that Donald Trump being elected president is a national emergency and a crisis that stems from a great cascade of failures.

There is an incredible appetite out there for in-depth, high-level conversations about what's going on.

We try to talk when the microphones are on the same way we would when the microphones are off.

I spent three years working at the White House and wanted to do something that wasn't about passing bills and resolutions.

I will never apologize for selective editing to make myself look better.

If you can make someone laugh about something that your opponent or your opposition thinks, that means you've done a really good job of highlighting what's wrong with their argument or their position.

I could have continued being a speechwriter for as long as I wanted.

'1600 Penn' was a hit. It's 2018. Anything you want can be true.

Most of my time at the White House, I wrote very unfunny speeches, but every year, I would work on the correspondents' dinner, which was a reminder of this other kind of writing that I loved to do.

The problem with taking venture capital is if you take $5m from someone, it may feel great; you may feel like they're validating your business model. But they're giving $5m out to 20 different people, hoping one of them will be a hit. They don't really care if it's you.

When I started Shutterstock, I tried to get people access to big events. It's very hard to keep up, to publish them quick, and to get the right photographers.

Business is a string of seemingly impossible problems looking for solutions. Each problem you solve creates a new barrier to entry for your next competitor.