Top 35 Ryan Murphy Quotes

I remember I always felt much more safe standing up on a chair and singing in front of my mother than I was in front of my father!

I started off as a journalist when I was young and I did not get paid unless I wrote three stories a day.

The greatest thing that you have when you’re a showrunner is this opportunity to create worlds.

Even though ‘Glee’ is sometimes a hard road, I am very excited about writing a multi-year arc.

I think that the work that Bette Davis and Joan Crawford did was truly extraordinary, and that’s their legacy. Not the other petty stuff.

With all of my work, it always takes a while for people to get it.

Just because you have a baby on your hip – or one on the way or two at home – doesn’t mean you can’t go after your dreams.

I came of age during AIDS and the terror of that and the sadness and the death and the overwhelming despair.

I love actors, but I really love actresses, and I really love actresses whose work touched and informed my coming-up years.

For me, the saddest thing in the world is always lost potential. That is always the most heartbreaking thing, when there’s something left to be mined from a situation or a person that goes unexplored; that’s a tragedy to me.

At the end of the day, a divorce is a divorce, and a break-up is a break-up. They are essentially small matters of the heart. They are human stories.

I love Olivia De Havilland. She is forever a lady.

In television and the movie business, the people who are promoted and the people who are mentored always look like the white guys.

I love ‘Girls’ on HBO because it’s brave and cool.

I would much rather have watched Jill Clayburgh in ‘An Unmarried Woman’ than ‘Star Wars.’ Even though I saw that movie when I was 11, I related emotionally to being left and thrown in a trash can on the side of the road. Her damage – I got it. I didn’t understand Han Solo at all.

I’m fascinated by the whole clown phobia thing because I personally don’t have it.

When I was growing up my favorite show was ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’, and I loved all the stuff that Norman Lear did.

I feel every day that everything I create – everything I do – I want it to be a risk. I think when you take the big swings – and I’ve done plenty of big swings that I was told were never going to work – those are always the things that break through.

I only wrote two fan letters in my life. One was to Bette Davis. And one was to Ron Palillo, who played Horshack on ‘Welcome Back, Kotter.’ And Ron did not write me back, but Bette Davis did.

I think John Landgraf sees things in the same way I do. We see eye to eye on a lot.

It’s a weird thing, my shows. I don’t know how to describe it, but I feel because I go about the casting process so slowly that it does feel like an instant family.

You know, I’m very particular about my sheets. They have to be one hundred percent cotton, with a high thread count. Only cotton. No flannel.

I actually think actors both are drawn to playing real-life historical people and are terrified.

Yeah, at home it’s all moonbeams and puppy-dog tails, so I guess I do have a darker side – and I like writing about it.

I don’t think there’s ever a winner in a feud. It’s about emotional pain and an inability to conquer the pain.

I lean into fear because I feel like that excites me as an artist.

One of the unique things about ‘American Horror Story’ is, it’s very respectful to actors. Actors in many cases don’t want to be tied down to a seven-year contract. So my deal with the cast is: you’re free after every year: you can come back, or you cannot come back.

I love Larry Kramer’s advocacy, and I love him as a person, and I think young people need to see that story.

I think when you take the big swings – and I’ve done plenty of big swings that I was told were never going to work – those are always the things that break through.

Joan Crawford and Bette Davis are larger than life. They just are. They sucked all the oxygen out of a room: they’re icons; they loom large in our imaginations. But the truth of the matter is both women were diminutive.

I feel like I grew up in such a big way in the past couple of years, in a way that I never thought I would. You can’t be the enfant terrible when you have the enfant at home.

All the big successes of my career have been ideas that, on paper, you think, ‘Well nobody’s going to go for this because that genre is so dead.’

I had a very rocky, difficult, emotional childhood with my parents.

One thing I always do is just tell actors that I’m as afraid as they are, because I can sense that, and I feel it, too.

I think the great thing about a television set is that it can be turned on and off, and you don’t have to watch it if you think it’s going to be something that you’re not going to like or learn from.