Quotes from David E. Kelley

Some of my high school teachers did remind me that I had an excellent imagination when it came to making up excuses.

Chemistry is not anything an executive producer or writer can orchestrate or plan you just hope for it.

You've got to honor your relationship with your audience - that they sit down because they want to be entertained. And that doesn't mean you can't provoke them and antagonize them and challenge them in the course of the entertainment as long as you keep the entertainment part of the equation alive.

Chemistry is not anything an executive producer or writer can orchestrate or plan; you just hope for it.

Some of my high school teachers did remind me that I had an excellent imagination when it came to making up excuses.

You've got to honor your relationship with your audience - that they sit down because they want to be entertained. And that doesn't mean you can't provoke them and antagonize them and challenge them in the course of the entertainment as long as you keep the entertainment part of the equation alive.

People are out of their home on a Saturday night or they're at the movies or they're at dinner and a lot of the people who flip on the television are doing just that. They may have never seen your show before and you can't count on to your audience to be there week in and week out.

One of the most fundamental questions people have about defense attorneys is, 'How can you do that? How can you go to bat everyday for a person that you may not know is guilty but you have a pretty good idea that he's not so innocent?' It's a question that defense attorneys answer for themselves by not addressing.

But I do believe that in all my shows, I really enjoy the quirky, the eccentric characters, the ones you don't meet every day.

In retrospect, I think it's a plus, because now we've been able to go back and spend extra time on each of those episodes and make them better.

So I think a writer should write what he loves, the people he relates to.

I never thought of myself as a writer.

I gravitate toward the law, I think, certainly more times than not, because it's our best mechanism for legislating human behavior, and morality, and ethics.

When the stories come easily and the writing process doesn't feel laboring, that's usually a good sign for me.

You learn more when things go wrong.

My court skills may have atrophied.

I've never really told jokes. I'm not good at it.

If you interview people or friends who work with me, they would say I'm private or internal or don't emote a lot. Yet I do it every day for 10 million people. I just don't do it for the 30 people I'm in the room with.

I miss Denny Crane.

The more lawyers there are, the more people are out there to encourage others not to go to law school.

It gets harder and harder to succeed and find audiences with the 500-channel universe, the remote control, and people being so trigger happy with that remote control. It just gets harder to get a foothold.

I don't think I could write a straight drama.

I don't think it's that strange that a show has sort of a bumpy beginning. It's just part and parcel of the process.

When I really have to push and grope and scratch and claw to make a story work, that's a telltale sign that maybe something conceptually isn't right.