My preference would have been to not go back on the air after 9\11, at all until the time felt right but that wasn't an option.

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.

Suicides? Heart attacks? The papers didn't seem interested. The world was full of ways to die, too many to cover. Newsworthy deaths had to be exceptional. Most people go unobserved.

You can't change what happened. Just like you can't change the future by worrying about it. You just have to keep moving.

You never know what you can do until you have to do it.

When I was a small kid, I grew up in the newspapers.

It make one's mouth hurt to speak with such forced merriment.

Things... well, things suck sometimes. And sometimes you can fix it. And sometimes you can't. It's just the way it is.

From an acting point of view you need to look at what you're bringing in.

As far as big egos, there are definitely guys out there that just think God only knows what about themselves.

If you hear Bing Crosby trying to swing, it doesn't work. He swings like a rusty gate.

When I was little, I met Ronald Reagan. I think I said something to him.