I certainly keep my eye on Washington all the time because often life is stranger than fiction.

I don't think that Washington is a fundamentally bad or corrupt place.

In Washington, if you're a congressman or a senator or the President, you make much more money than the average American, but you'd think that if you were the leader of the free world you'd be making major bank, and you don't.

Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't.

Is self-interest a bad thing? We want our leaders to be pure and good, but at the same time we want them to be effective, and to be effective you often have to be ruthless and not bound by ideology or the same morals that we pretend to hold ourselves to.

The political world is a dark place. If you want to portray it accurately, authentically, you've got to turn out the lights from time to time.