Sometimes bureaucracies are incompetent, just by virtue of the fact that they're bureaucracies. And, sometimes, Jack has to do things outside the law.

Virtue became less the harsh and martial self-sacrifice of antiquity and more the modern willingness to get along with others for the sake of peace and prosperity.

At this point, having done it for as long as we've done it, there's a certain amount of faith you have in the process that we're going to do it.

I mean, we know in general we'll avert a terrorist threat or conclude the conventional story, but we begin the year sort of pretending we have the first four to six (episodes). But even as we're writing those, they change. And I think one of the reasons the show has the quality it does . . . is we're so critical and so we revise ourselves. We revise it again. And in that process things just change too quickly to plan ahead too much.

I'm not kidding you when I tell you we don't know what's going to happen next episode. I really mean it.

I wish that were the case. It's not true. But I think on some unconscious level, maybe we know more than we think we know.