I'll get cast occasionally as sort of the jerk version of myself, and I have fun doing that. But it's really better for everyone if I stay behind the camera.
If I am writing a movie and I am stuck, I can call the studio and tell them it's delayed. You can't do that with television - you have air dates to meet.
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.
Don't try to guess what it is people want and give it to them. Don't ask for a show of hands. Try your best to write what you like, what you think your friends would like and what you think your father would like and then cross your fingers... The most valuable thing you have is your own voice.
If you lined up 10 writers and asked them to write a movie about Steve Jobs, you'd get 10 very different movies.
While I was doing 'The Newsroom,' I always had the news on on different networks on different TVs around my house and around my office.
I can't remember my dreams more than a couple of seconds after I wake up. It's frustrating because sometimes I dream that I'm watching a really good movie.
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.
When I create a TV show, it's so that I can write it. I'm not an empire builder; my writing staff is usually a combination of two kinds of people - experts in the world the show is set in, and young writers who will not be unhappy if they're not writing scripts.
I'm not on Facebook, and I don't tweet, but I know plenty of people who love both.
I think I would have done very well as a writer in the Forties. I think the last time America was a great country was then or not long after. It was before Vietnam, before Watergate.
Not all paintings are abstract; they're not all Jackson Pollock. There's value in a photograph of a man alone on a boat at sea, and there is value in painting of a man alone on a boat at sea. In the painting, the painting has more freedom to express an idea, more latitude in being able to elicit certain emotion.
I've never written anything that I haven't wanted to write again. I want to, and still am, writing 'A Few Good Men' again. I didn't know what I was doing then, and I'm still trying to get it right. I would write 'The Social Network' again if they would let me, I'd write 'Moneyball' again. I would write 'The West Wing' again.
When we were doing 'The West Wing,' the hardest thing about doing 'The West Wing' was being compared to yourself. You go out there and want every episode to be as good as your best episode. I wrote 88 episodes of 'The West Wing,' and when you do that, one of them is going to be your 88th best, so your 88th best better be pretty good.
My parents took me to see plays, starting from when I was very little. Oftentimes, I was too young to understand. I don't know what my parents were thinking - 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf' when I was eight years old, that kind of thing. So lots of times, I didn't understand what was going on, but I just loved the sound of dialogue.