When I really have to push and grope and scratch and claw to make a story work, that's a telltale sign that maybe something conceptually isn't right.

The ideal time for writing a [television] script is four days, though sometimes it has to be two or three days depending on the deadline. If it's two days, sometimes there are things I see that don't work as well. If I have two weeks, the scripts get kind of flabby and lack the adrenaline that a sense of deadline fills you with.

When you create a show, and create characters, these people are like children to you.

It gets harder and harder to succeed and find audiences with the 500-channel universe, the remote control, and people being so trigger happy with that remote control. It just gets harder to get a foothold.

You've got to honor your relationship with your audience - that they sit down because they want to be entertained. And that doesn't mean you can't provoke them and antagonize them and challenge them in the course of the entertainment as long as you keep the entertainment part of the equation alive.

You learn more when things go wrong.

I never thought of myself as a writer.

But I do believe that in all my shows, I really enjoy the quirky, the eccentric characters, the ones you don't meet every day.

People are out of their home on a Saturday night or they're at the movies or they're at dinner and a lot of the people who flip on the television are doing just that. They may have never seen your show before and you can't count on to your audience to be there week in and week out.

I don't think I could write a straight drama.

The designer [...] has a passion for doing something that fits somebody's needs, but that is not just a simple fix. The designer has a dream that goes beyond what exists, rather than fixing what exists. [...] The designer wants to create a solution that fits in a deeper situational or social sense.

I've never really told jokes. I'm not good at it.

In retrospect, I think it's a plus, because now we've been able to go back and spend extra time on each of those episodes and make them better.

If you interview people or friends who work with me, they would say I'm private or internal or don't emote a lot. Yet I do it every day for 10 million people. I just don't do it for the 30 people I'm in the room with.

Chemistry is not anything an executive producer or writer can orchestrate or plan you just hope for it.

But Steven Bochco was smart he knew that viewers were smart.

So I think a writer should write what he loves, the people he relates to.

The more lawyers there are, the more people are out there to encourage others not to go to law school.