It doesn't matter that Bush scares the hell out of me. What matters is that he scares the hell out of a lot of very important people in Washington who can't speak out, in the military, in the intelligence community.

I joined the 'Times' in 1972, and I came with the mark of Cain on me because I was clearly against the war. But my editor, Abe Rosenthal, he hired me because he liked stories. He used to come to the Washington bureau and almost literally pat me on the head and say, 'How is my little Commie today? What do you have for me?'

I don't think I've ever met a public official that didn't think he was doing the right thing. I can't think of one.

I'm not convinced that every secret has to be published. I think there are secrets worth keeping, and I think there are secrets not worth keeping.

There is a saying: 'The child is parent to the adult', which means whatever happens to you as a child or teenager affects the adult you become. You are forged in your history. And fiction is an incredibly important force in shaping children, and that's why fiction needs to be diverse.

I'm gonna go hard no matter what because I gotta feed my family, and I gotta feed myself.

I think being a guest star on an ongoing TV show can be a nightmare, and I've done it a lot. You're walking into this family who's very comfortable where they are, and you have to jump on the train and be artificially comfortable. That's a very hard thing to do.

It was always inevitable that if you get serious trouble in any family then everybody's inclined to look at the head of that family and see if they see any cause or reason to associate it with the head of the, head of the family, why it should be.