Richard LaGravenese

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I'm tired of doing rewrites for executives.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I'm very much interested in doing actual theater.”

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

“TV is where a writer can write his novel.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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!”

“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.”

“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.”

“I'm a dramatist.”

“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.”