Quotes from Lawrence O'Donnell

Big city mayors don't play well with voters outside their city anymore. Just ask John Lindsay, Ed Koch, Kevin White, Tom Bradley, Dick Riordon. Rudy Giuliani is no exception.

I don't for one second spend any time thinking about carefully ingratiating myself with someone for the future.

I discovered, to my surprise, that writing for live television made me a faster writer.

Being American means you never have to say you surrender.

Melania Trump's husband tweeted this: "Arianna Huffington is unattractive both inside and out. I fully understand why her former husband left her for a man. He made a good decision."

In this case, the government will essentially be run by the people who are running it now. The top level [Barack] Obama appointees will leave by inauguration day.

Jeff Sessions wished he wasn't the attorney general. The president Donald Trump has the most incompetent cabinet in history, and he's unhappy with only one of them. Only Jeff Sessions.

Teachers who have committed their lives to the classroom deserve better than our politics has given them.

If a website has something I should know, somebody is spinning it around Twitter and I'll see it there. Before I would look at Huffington Post and Slate every day, now I follow them on Twitter.

If I write a cop show, it's not up to me to decide how different it is from 'Law & Order.' I had screenwriters go on and on and on about how their cop show isn't like any other cop show on TV. They made very good points, and it absolutely doesn't matter. It's entirely up to the audience to decide.

I can be as crazy as anybody and go over lines I should not go over.

Look, [Mitt] Romney comes from a religion founded by a criminal who was anti-American, pro-slavery, and a rapist. And he comes from that lineage and says, 'I respect this religion fully.'

Around the courthouse when defense lawyers are chatting about their cases, the only question they ask each other is can you put your guy on the stand? Those conversations always assume the defendant is guilty. The question is just about the degree of difficulty in presenting a defense.

All writers are forced to live within deadlines, and deadlines determine how good they can be.

The pundit world, having spent years in awe of Karl Rove, will never understand how bad he is at his White House job.

The thing about live TV is that it simply has to be done, there's no space for procrastination.

Where I come from, no one settled their disagreements with bets, because no one of us had any money to bet.

There are people who hate me, there are people who like me, and they're both right. I think people hate me for the right reasons, which is my politics and what they discern to be my personal attitudes.

One of the things that I see on Twitter is that people think they know what you think about things you haven't discussed.

Nothing outrages and disappoints an extremist more than compromise.

I have no broadcasting training. No one's ever said to me, 'This is how you read a Teleprompter.' They just pointed to it and said, 'It's over there.'

If you have five weeks to write an episode of television or seven months to write a movie or several years to write a book, each of those things is going to be better than a live television show.

I always knew I'd be leaving government someday. I just didn't know when. There was something about knowing that it was temporary that left me in writerly observational mode.

Staten Island is set off completely by itself in its own world, and that's one of the fascinating things about it, dramatically.