Quotes from Richard LaGravenese

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'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!

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.

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

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

Disney usually doesn't do pitches for original ideas.

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.

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 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.

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.

did you lose your mind all of the sudden or was it a slow, gradual process?

I realized love won't obey our expectations, it's mystery is pure and absolute.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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 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?

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.

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.

The South is like a foreign country to me!

I'm tired of doing rewrites for executives.