Richard LaGravenese Quotations

The territory has changed, and a lot of really good actors want to do cable series, but they don't necessarily want to do network TV and make the commitment of 22 episodes or whatever. They find that the liberties and the creative freedoms that you get in cable is more interesting to them than the censorship of a network show.

In 1996, Shakespeare's 'Twelfth Night' was removed from classrooms after a school board passed a 'prohibition of alternative lifestyle instruction' act. Apparently, a young female character disguised as a boy was a danger to the youth of Merrimack, New Hampshire.

My dad was a presence, of course, but he worked nights a lot, and I would only see him one day a week.

There is a musical rhythm to great writing, especially if it's performed correctly.

Paul Hicks is the only guy The Beatles will allow to arrange, mix and engineer their music, so he did the Cirque du Soleil 'Love' show.

We have people in our lives who help us evolve along the way. If you're lucky, you find someone who evolves along with you, and that's what you call a long-term relationship.

The real Liberace - and I'll preface this by saying that I didn't know the real one - was a man who didn't come from much. His father left him and his family for another woman. His father was a musician, which I thought was pretty interesting.

TV is where a writer can write his novel.

As soon as you're finished shooting, you have to go into the edit room and choose all of the shots that you're going to commit to because the visual effects vendor has to get it because they'll spend months on it. So, you're editing out of sequence before you've gotten a film for the movie and the performances.

Connie Heermann is a Freedom Writer teacher. I believe she represents the best of what dedicated teachers can be because she chose to serve her students, not her school board.

I've been a teenager. I even feel like I've been a 16-year-old girl. So I have a lot of voices inside my head!

Sondheim is my god; I love the man. I learned a great deal about writing from his work, his lyrics, and his structure.

A friend of mine from college is married to Neil Levy, who started on 'Saturday Night Live' in the early days and is a really great guy and funny writer.

Nowadays, Skype is a generational way of putting both people on camera at the same time.

It's not uncommon to have chaotic writers' rooms.

I had to audition as an actor, and I got so tired of doing the same monologues over and over, so I started writing my own, and then I started selling them to other actors.

I'm very much interested in doing actual theater.

'Thelma & Louise' really hit a nerve, and I loved that movie.

When I was young, I had two older sisters, and since I was the youngest in my family, my mom took me around with her all the time. I was forever with her when she was having coffee in the middle of the afternoon with her three sisters. And they would talk about men. I absorbed a lot of that.

You can take the high moral ground intellectually, but if it ever happens to you personally, I don't know that I could honestly say that I wouldn't want to kill someone who took someone away from me. So, it's a rich, fertile ground for great characters and great storytelling. That was the impetus.

I tend to believe, when you're in a relationship, if you don't fight, it's not a real relationship. You have to have arguments and tensions, otherwise I don't believe it.

Women have to take more control of their careers. They can't just wait to be cast in a film.

If I can make a living as a writer, I can do anything.

It wasn't the intention to do something important, or to even relate about social issues. The ground is so fertile in the justice world, dealing with the death penalty and the Innocence Project, for characters that have a moral ambiguity, which we were both attracted to. It's the idea that everybody has their reasons. Whatever their actions are, whether you agree with them or not, you can understand why they're feeling that way, in terms of racism or even the death penalty.

I've always shot on film, but the times are changing.

I just really have an affinity for women. Watching them go through journeys is more interesting to me than watching men.

. . . I felt that making her one-dimensional would be an insult to the audience, and also not as interesting. All destructive people have an inner side to them, and the more three-dimentional your characters are on screen the more compassion you can open up in an audience . . .. To me, that involves the audience more, it stimulates them and asks more of them.