Top 51 Quotes & Sayings by Richard LaGravenese

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.

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

I think musical theater fans - obsessive fans - are very much like Comic Con fans in our personalities. We're very possessive, and we're very obsessive, and we're very critical. So don't screw with our stuff.

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

I'm tired of doing rewrites for executives.

My true nature, I believe, is writing.

How do you survive living in a cell knowing you are innocent? Many of those exonerated whom I have met seem to have a more benign, grateful attitude toward life than those of us who walk free. Many find a religious or spiritual stronghold.

I'm not really a believer in romantic, happily-ever-after love stories.

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.

TV is where a writer can write his novel.

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.

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.

Disney usually doesn't do pitches for original ideas.

The death penalty issue is obviously a divisive one. But whether one is for or against, you can not deny the basic illogic - if we know the system is flawed, if we know there are innocent people on Death Row, then until the system is reformed, should we not abandon the death penalty to protect those who are innocent?

The South is like a foreign country to me!

'The Last Five Years' was a musical in 2002, and it's a deconstruction of a marriage.

The woman who runs the Pennsylvania Innocence Project told me that there's a man she's been trying to get out of prison for 26 years. Every night before she goes to bed, she thinks, 'What is he doing?' She says you don't sleep. And yet, she has the greatest sense of humor and this light that comes out of her.

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.

Barbara Stanwyck movies drove me nuts, like 'Ball of Fire' and 'Double Indemnity.' I used to go cuckoo when I would see those films.

I always thought that if you don't feel the breath in the actors' bodies, you lose all the intimacy and truth.

Every marriage is weird! That's what it is - we just all need to start embracing the fact that there is no normal.

I'm a dramatist.

Even as a kid, I was more enchanted watching Bette Davis than Errol Flynn.

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

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.

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

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

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.

The thing that I love is human behavior - why people do what they do, who they are, and the choices that they make - and that has to always be plot driven.

Academy Awards don't really solve anything.

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

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

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

I didn't write to become a director, which many people do.

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

I really like Rosamund Pike very much.

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.

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.

Families always have these unspoken dramas, and at holidays, everyone is supposed to sit down and pretend that none of that is going on.

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!

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

I don't want to be a writer where all the characters sound the same. There's a facility in that kind of writing.

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.

You can have ambiguity in television that you are not allowed in film... at least in Hollywood studio films.

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.

What I do usually is read the book first, for pleasure, to see if my brain starts connecting with it, as a movie. And then, if I say yes, I read it again, only this time I take a pen and, inside the book, I say, "Okay, this is a scene. I don't need this. I'm going to try this. I'm not going to take this." And then, I use that book like a bible and each chapter heading, I write a menu of what's in that chapter, in case I ever need to reference it. And then, I start to outline and write it. I get in there and it starts to evolve, based on having re-read it again.

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 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.

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. My mother always said, "If you don't fight, you can't have a marriage. You have to fight for each other. If you don't know how to fight, relationships tend not to last."