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.

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

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'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!

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

The South is like a foreign country to me!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disney usually doesn't do pitches for original ideas.

I'm tired of doing rewrites for executives.

I really like Rosamund Pike very much.

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?