I don't tend to write straight dramas where real life just impinges. But because I don't, when I do, it is very interesting to slap people in the face with just an absolute of life.

I've had so much success. I had something to say, I got to say it, people heard it, and they agreed. That's every artist's dream. That's the brass ring.

I just love language. I mean, I love it. I love stage directions. Any opportunity to write. I hadn't written in so long, I get very crazy and miserable. I - it's like not seeing my kids: I can't do it for very long.

The people who feel the most strongly about something will turn on you the most vociferously if they feel you've let them down.

I like horror; I like comedy; I like drama; I like action; I like female heroes.

I've often said there's no such thing as a track record in TV. I seen people who created things much more successful than mine treated like dirt.

The master plan does not have a master plan. Television ultimately finds itself, and after it finds itself, it finds itself changing.

The fact is some people really love my work, some people not so much, but at the end of the day, I don't want anybody coming out of the movie thinking about me.

My dad would go to work every day and write in a room full of funny people. He enjoyed it. I know great writers who find the process agonising but to me, writing has always been sheer joy.

I always want to make sure I'm telling a story about people that I care about.

The thing with the comics is that you have license to go down every alley your brain can think of.

Wonder Woman isn't Spider-man or Batman. She doesn't have a town, she has a world. That was more interesting to me than a kind of contained, rote superhero franchise.

Especially, I think, living in any fantasy or science fiction world means really understanding what you're seeing and reading really densely on a level that a lot of people don't bother to read.

I always tend to think just left of center, to remove myself from the world by one step. It is very freeing, and it's a particular way of coming at stories and looking at them that I find the most beautiful stuff that I know comes from, ultimately.

I never give up on anything, because you come back around, and suddenly the thing you thought you'd never do is relevant.

I'll always protect what I'm working on. Which is why more and more of it is stuff only I can ruin.

I respect television in a way that some people who came out of film might not.

Shakespeare's language does not require a British accent. It requires a facility with language, and that's all.

I've been doing Shakespeare readings with my friends for years.

I love a good romantic comedy.

I've been in this business for a long while, but it's not like I've been waiting tables. Since I started writing, I've only worked on things that I love. I've had a lot of heartbreak, but you don't become an artist and not expect that.

I'm very much more interested in the created family than I am in actual families.

I usually write things in my head before I ever write them down. When I write it out, usually I've already figured out what it is I'm trying to do.

Soon, I will be 'King of all Hollywoodland.'

I do have screenplays I've written that never saw the light of day, but I don't usually go back to them. When I've told a story, I want to tell another story.

The musicals that I love on stage are generally meant for the stage.

The more you can create a structure by which people live in a fantastical situation and by which they will act, and the more you lay that out for the audience, the more they will feel at home in it.

I kept telling my mom that reading comic books would pay off.

I was a little bit ashamed of American TV because I thought, 'None of the shows my father works on are as funny as my father.'

My mom is a teacher, my dad was a writer for television, his dad was a writer for television, and combining those two has been sort of the goal of my life.

I loved teaching and I did a lot of work as a teacher's assistant in college, and my favorite experience was basically getting a laugh from a bunch of people because they had just understood something.

You learn something every time you make a mistake.

Local government is a gamble that can have disastrous consequences when it fails.

To be white in America is to have the confidence to say, without a second thought: this space, this neighborhood, this city, this county, this country is mine.

Democrats may want working-class white Rust Belters to have good jobs at high wages with pensions and health benefits, but they can't make them vote that way.

If a novel were written about Florida's administration of its healthcare for the working poor, an appropriate title might be: 'Don't get sick, and God help you if you do.'

Ailes built a Kingdom of Yes. That was his genius. He understood the id of many white conservatives - their sense of constant persecution and victimization; and their existential fears of an America whose racial makeup, sexual mores and gender roles were careening in the opposite direction of the country of their childhood.

Who in the GOP would complain if Trump federalizes 'stop and frisk' or encourages its proliferation in states using the power of the Justice Department purse?

Trump, who in his own history as a developer preferred mob concrete and Chinese steel to the variety produced in the Rust Belt, cannot bring back the steel and manufacturing jobs lost in Lorain, Ohio or western Pennsylvania.

Freedom is neither guaranteed nor automatic; not even in the United States. Left unguarded, it can slip away like a thief in the night.

For decades, the GOP has faithfully served the rich, corporations, polluters and purveyors of pure, unadulterated greed, and brought blue-collar white voters along for the ride with promises of cultural revival.

Even at its most outrageous early moments, the Tea Party movement was treated to sober and at times breathless media coverage, to the point of being invited to co-host a presidential debate.

If you are a certain kind of white conservative, especially a white male conservative, then Roger Ailes was a hero. He constructed a world in which your core beliefs and your gut instincts were, and still are, constantly validated.

I multitask and always have the TV on in the background. If I need to focus, I generally have to turn off the TV.

As a media consultant to Republican presidents, Ailes proved a deft manipulator of racial fear. But it was in building Fox News that he found his calling.

Trump has humbled our country under the shadow of China's autocrat Xi Jinping.

Technology has made it a lot easier to be productive. It's incredibly helpful to be able to get little bits of information quickly.

Votes for president have long been a kind of social signifier. People will proudly boast that they voted for JFK; while it's harder to find those eager to claim having supported Richard Nixon.

When I was 15 years old, my sister and I went on a trip to Europe. We went on scholarship because my mother didn't have the money to pay the full fare for the two of us, which ran into the thousands of dollars.

Trump's affinity for Russia dates back at least to the late 1980s, during the time of the Soviet Union, and it intensified after his financial empire collapsed.