Most of my time at the White House, I wrote very unfunny speeches, but every year, I would work on the correspondents' dinner, which was a reminder of this other kind of writing that I loved to do.
— Jon Lovett
They're the last human beings susceptible to human shame. Politicians are the only people left for whom, occasionally, shame hurts them. Everyone else, we've sort of done away with it as a concept, and we're hurtling through space like animals, basically.
We have a lot of really boring, silly, stupid politics. We need people to point that out.
I don't live in the city of L.A. I live in West Hollywood.
As a rule, I think people in L.A. are interested in any writer who brings a different skill set and experiences. There's an attraction to novelty and to anyone whose writing isn't based in screenwriting. I had that novelty.
We try to talk when the microphones are on the same way we would when the microphones are off.
I would like to be able to write in my own voice.
I went into politics for the reasons most people do: ambition, self-righteousness, and a desire to help others.
It's certainly true that presidents have confidantes who rise above what you would call just staff.
The great thing about writing jokes for President Obama is that he is not afraid to tell jokes that are actually funny - and not just funny for a politician.
I'm motivated by a bottomless well of anger. It's a joke, but I don't think I don't mean it.
Nationalism is not that hard. It's not that hard to incite people against another, and it's also - and this is the harder thing: Democrats have, and the challenge we have all the time, is we believe in governing and governance and trying to find middle ground.
One thing that is for certain is that there are tens of millions of people who are deeply unsatisfied with the way they get their political news.
So often on CNN, there's a world-class journalist interviewing campaign rejects and ideologues and silly, craven people who do not care about informing people, that aren't there to help people understand what's going on in the news.
I'm famously humble.
I am very glad that Paul Ryan left the government as a capitulating supplicant to Donald Trump while the government was shut down, while the debt hit record levels, right? Every single thing Paul Ryan claimed to care about.
I don't know the venture fund terms. I don't know what a seed round is. I want nothing to do with it.
'1600 Penn' was a hit. It's 2018. Anything you want can be true.
More and more people support equality for their gay friends and neighbors, and that is not because the 'Duck Dynasty' guy almost lost his show.
If you can make someone laugh about something that your opponent or your opposition thinks, that means you've done a really good job of highlighting what's wrong with their argument or their position.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. That's what you have to do: you have to be confident in your potential and aware of your inexperience.
It's a reasonable thing to tell somebody, 'I've watched 70 hours of 'Game of Thrones.'' That's a totally normal, boring thing to say about yourself. But if you were like, 'I just spent 100 hours playing 'Skyrim,'' people think you're a weirdo.
There is an incredible appetite out there for in-depth, high-level conversations about what's going on.
It's always been a dream of mine to write comedy and be creative.
There's only so much mistrust we can take before things get much worse.
'The West Wing' was an incredible, inspiring show - and one of the reasons I wanted to be a speechwriter.
It was awesome how supportive the White House was. It meant a lot to me that when I left, the people that I worked with - Jon Favreau and David Axelrod and others - really understood that this was something that I felt I held had to do.
Humor is a way of saying we're all seeing the same ridiculous, absurd, infuriating things together.
Barack Obama took office in the middle of a massive financial crisis. He was handed a bunch of messes all around the world and at home.
One of the lessons of 2016 is to spend less time worrying about what will happen and more time worrying about what we want to happen.
I'm not insulting Trump supporters; I'm calling the people that CNN puts on television terrible representatives of the views of conservatives.
Every technology company should have a red button somewhere in the headquarters where, if they realize they've caused more societal harm than they expected and done more harm than good, they press the button, and the company dissolves instantly.
You look at what animates Democratic voters; you look at what animates Democratic politicians: it's health care. It's increasingly climate. It is wages and economic issues. It's issues around reproductive freedom and criminal justice reform and inequality.
We need to stop telling each other to shut up. We need to get comfortable with the reality that no one is going to shut up.
I could have continued being a speechwriter for as long as I wanted.
We need people to point out groupthink - We need people to point out stale, old, dumb thinking - and we sometimes need to do that when it's considered dangerous, strange, or, by some, offensive. And we should be, all of us, trying to protect that. It's really important.
I will never apologize for selective editing to make myself look better.
We are drowning in partisan rhetoric that is just true enough not to be a lie; in industry-sponsored research; in social media's imitation of human connection; in legalese and corporate double-speak.
I spent three years working at the White House and wanted to do something that wasn't about passing bills and resolutions.
I personally believe that Donald Trump being elected president is a national emergency and a crisis that stems from a great cascade of failures.
It is extremely chilling that Donald Trump views the spectacle of choosing cabinet appointments in a way that is similar to deciding whether or not to fire Lil Jon or Joan Rivers.
The one thing I didn't want to do was a show about the White House. I was too close to it.
'Veep' is a great satire of democracy.
I had never really planned on being a speechwriter.
It doesn't matter what the early votes look like. It doesn't matter what the polls look like. We can lose everything.
Little things had to go wrong for Donald Trump to become president: Comey, emails, all that stuff. Big things did make Trump possible. Big, cultural, political, economic forces opened the door to someone like Trump.
'Pod Save America' will be a kingmaker.
Making '1600 Penn' was really fun, and I learned a lot.
We've been dealing with censorship around multimedia, about multinational companies and the content they create, for a very long time.
People say that making money in the content-media game is hard, and that is just, like, not my experience. It's super-confusing, 'cause everyone's like, 'Oh, how are you going to monetize?' It's easy: just start talking, and then money rolls in.
