William Devane Quotes

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.

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.

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.

Ultimately the Emmys are a popularity contest.

There’s a certain possessiveness of writers sometimes.

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

The same issue is happening on a show like Everybody Loves Raymond now, which is in its eighth year and struggling to come up with good stories. It’ll be interesting to see how they do. The bottom line is, it starts with the writers and ends with the writers.

The business is built on slowing or even stopping the aging process.

Networks don’t want a show with a continuing story. There’s no backend potential.

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.

It worked well because Don Murray didn’t want to be on Knots anymore.

If you watch Cheers, in 12 years they didn’t age a day.

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.

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.

I try to watch only real things, which basically amounts to C-Span for me. I like real people in real situations. I learn from that.

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

I didn’t care about that because I’m not a diplomatic person to begin with. I just went along with things and did what I wanted to do because I knew they had to shoot their 12 pages a day. And when they realized that I didn’t alter the text they really didn’t mind what I did.

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.

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.

David was the kind of guy who was totally supportive of the actors and instructed the writing staff to trust the actor’s instincts, since after all, it’s the actors playing the character.