A biography for Jon Lovetthasn’t been written yet.
“I could have continued being a speechwriter for as long as I wanted.”
“Making '1600 Penn' was really fun, and I learned a lot.”
“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.”
“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.”
“It's always been a dream of mine to write comedy and be creative.”
“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.”
“I'm famously humble.”
“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.”
“Regardless of how lyrical or rhetorically gifted they are in conveying big ideas, any candidate can do a good job of giving a speech if the goal of a speech is more than just delivering it well but achieving some end, whether it's convincing people of some issue or persuading them about you as a person.”
“Life tests our willingness, in ways large and small, to tell the truth.”
“A boring speech can be just a boring speech. But a speech with a joke that falls flat is awful. I hate it. That's why I think it's easier to hate a comedy. If a drama doesn't land, it's boring; if a joke doesn't land - you hate that.”
“When a joke works, it works. It can make a point in a really simple way; it can be a great little sound bite to put on television or share on social media. Humor has this incredible power in how we communicate about politics now, in part because there's something natural in the way it's communicated.”
“Republicans paint everything that Democrats have been for as socialism, too far to the left, as extreme, and it didn't matter how moderated it was; it didn't matter that Obamacare started out as a compromise. You might as well say what you're actually for and show what you really are.”
“When in doubt, mock the powerful, not the powerless.”
“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.”
“We try to talk when the microphones are on the same way we would when the microphones are off.”
“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.”
“I am a deeply awkward person; I am not cool.”
“I will never apologize for selective editing to make myself look better.”
“Everybody hates Congress; even Congress hates Congress.”