William Devane

“Donna Mills came on the show as a female antagonist, about a year before, so now they wanted to have a male antagonist. I was cast as a Senator to shake things up.”

“I'm an Irish-American, and I grew up in an Irish-American neighborhood.”

“I like working fast, but I got to the age where the real difference between television and the movies is, I'm not smart enough to be in the movies. It's a very political world. In all modesty, I can say that I'm a much better actor, but that doesn't matter.”

“What I would have liked to do on that show was play a secretary of state who has huge personal business interests throughout the world. That, to me, seems to be more in synch with reality.”

“When you go to a movie, it's about what's not being said. I tried to bring that to Greg Sumner. It was always about what's not being said.”

“Writers are not always right however, but then again, I've been on shows where the actors have complete control and change everything and it's terrible.”

“I knew with The West Wing that that wasn't going to be for very long, that I was just the red herring.”

“Networks don't want a show with a continuing story. There's no backend potential.”

“It worked well because Don Murray didn't want to be on Knots anymore.”

“Even though shows like NYPD Blue are soaps in my opinion, but they're individualized to an extent that you can still follow what's going on if you miss a week.”

“I would fix other people's lines if they asked me on occasion. The hard part of writing is the architecture of it, getting the story and structuring it. Not the tweaking of lines.”

“Clint Eastwood is aging beautifully. But someone like Burt Reynolds and others are practically destroying their faces in the amount of work they have.”

“I don't play polo anymore because I am too old. But we still have a half a dozen horses - a couple of young horses we are teaching how to play polo and older horses that are real trustworthy when you get them up in the mountains.”

“A show like Knots or any other show that can be called a soap opera does terribly in syndication because if you're a viewer and you miss a week you don't know what's going on.”

“I'm trying to find a character that's my age and I can sustain week after week. I'd like to do a series.”

“If you watch Cheers, in 12 years they didn't age a day.”

“And all of Laura's stuff, what they wrote originally wasn't as good and Constance wound up doing that herself. That was all her stuff, reading to the child, because she had children herself and that's what she would have done.”

“The West Wing seems to be feeding the myth about how presidential politics are.”

“It would have been nice for Greg to eventually grow into a mature relationship with Laura. He was moving toward that already but then took a turn into the juvenile with Paige.”

“At one time, whenever the hell it was, they wanted a character to come in and stir up the pot. They brought me in for 8-10 episodes and said we'll try it for that.”