Jon Lovett

“Because the speech is an argument, and a great speech makes an argument well, the act of making that argument is a really important part of how the policy process coalesces and solidifies both for the candidate and also the people serving that candidate.”

“Part of my job as a presidential speechwriter (along with great writers like Jon Favreau and David Axelrod) was finding that sliver where 'presidential' and 'actually funny' overlap.”

“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 personally believe that Donald Trump being elected president is a national emergency and a crisis that stems from a great cascade of failures.”

“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.”

“The conversation on Twitter and the way people are in the world are very different.”

“There is that definition of leadership that says, 'Leadership is convincing people to do things that they otherwise wouldn't have done because you've made them believe it's the right thing to do.' And a great speech can do that.”

“I'm motivated by a bottomless well of anger. It's a joke, but I don't think I don't mean it.”

“'Veep' is a great satire of democracy.”

“I'm not insulting Trump supporters; I'm calling the people that CNN puts on television terrible representatives of the views of conservatives.”

“Trump is a raptor testing the fences, and he found weaknesses to escape and try things that would work, every single day.”

“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.”

“I don't know the venture fund terms. I don't know what a seed round is. I want nothing to do with it.”

“Humor connects us, especially in politics. It's a way of surprising one another with shared context and experience.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The Internet didn't cause Donald Trump, and it certainly can't solve Donald Trump.”

“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.”

“I spent three years working at the White House and wanted to do something that wasn't about passing bills and resolutions.”

“I had never really planned on being a speechwriter.”