A biography for Jon Lovetthasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“The one thing I didn't want to do was a show about the White House. I was too close to it.”
“'The West Wing' was an incredible, inspiring show - and one of the reasons I wanted to be a speechwriter.”
“I don't live in the city of L.A. I live in West Hollywood.”
“Kellyanne Conway is one of the most dishonest humans ever to grace the office she holds.”
“One of the hardest lessons of childhood is reckoning with the instability of the world.”
“There is an incredible appetite out there for in-depth, high-level conversations about what's going on.”
“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.”
“If there is one way that I would sum up what the 2016 election was on cable news, it was world-class journalists interviewing morons.”
“Sometimes you're going to be inexperienced, naive, untested, and totally right. And then, in those moments, you have to make a choice: is this a time to speak up, or hang back?”
“When I was a kid, all I knew about Michael Jackson was that he was crazy. He had a monkey named Bubbles and some kind of oxygen chamber, and he used to be black, but he made himself white, and he was nuts. That was Michael Jackson in full. Wacko Jacko.”
“A great speech can make you remember something about what you believe, about who you are, about who you want to be. It's rare when that kind of thing happens. But it is important, and it is real.”
“I'll always cringe remembering those little embarrassing moments when I said something dumb on a conference call, when my inexperience poked through, when I should have been more solicitous of the judgment of those around me. They're a reminder that it's not mutually exclusive to be confident and humble, to be skeptical and eager to learn.”
“Washington is filled with people making other people's arguments for money.”
“There's only so much mistrust we can take before things get much worse.”
“It doesn't matter what the early votes look like. It doesn't matter what the polls look like. We can lose everything.”
“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.”
“It's certainly true that presidents have confidantes who rise above what you would call just staff.”
“The First Amendment's protections have always put a great deal of responsibility in our hands: not only to respect the power of our own speech, but also to respect that same power in the hands of people we despise.”
“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.”