William Devane Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.