Top Quotes from Ryan Murphy

I’m very black and white about what I like or don’t like, and I’ve always been that way.

Ryan Murphy

I think I have a pattern of nice and lovely and then dark and twisted.

Ryan Murphy

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.

Ryan Murphy

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.

Ryan Murphy

When I talk to young people, I always tell them the biggest lesson I learned was that you shouldn’t care about the outcome. If it fails, it fails. Every failure will groom you for your next big reward.

Ryan Murphy

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.’

Ryan Murphy

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.

Ryan Murphy

I started off in this business in 1998, and I didn’t fit in. There was no place for me, and I always felt like an oddball. Nobody really understood my work or what I wanted to do in my references.

Ryan Murphy

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

Ryan Murphy

I was very much raised by my grandmother, who actually was Bette Davis – looked like her, acted like her, talked like her. Probably, it was just out of my love and affection for my grandmother that I was interested in Bette.

Ryan Murphy

I do work with a lot of women in my company, and I write a lot of roles for women over 40. I think, in ‘Feud’ alone, we have 15 roles for women over 40, which I’m very proud about.

Ryan Murphy

I love Sarah Jessica Parker; I’ve worked with her. I think she’s amazing… She’s a great producer and has a great business acumen.

Ryan Murphy

I feel every day that everything I create – everything I do – I want it to be a risk.

Ryan Murphy

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.

Ryan Murphy

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.

Ryan Murphy

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

Ryan Murphy

Well, I’m from Indiana. So to me when I was a little kid growing up, Cincinnati was the glamorous New York of it all.

Ryan Murphy

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

Ryan Murphy

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.

Ryan Murphy

I had been accepted to film school, but my parents couldn’t afford it, and yet they made too much money for me to get a scholarship.

Ryan Murphy

Tone is everything in TV.

Ryan Murphy

Originally, ‘Popular’ was going to be a movie.

Ryan Murphy

I love crispy, cool sheets.

Ryan Murphy

I’ve gotten death threats, yes. I have. I think anytime you shine a spotlight on homosexuality or minorities and you try and say they are as normal or as worthy as acceptance as others, the people who are on the fringe don’t like that and they will come after you. And they have come after me.

Ryan Murphy

As a showrunner, you can never be a ‘maybe.’ When I do movies, there is a lot of, ‘Maybe’ and, ‘Let’s investigate that.’ But for TV, it has to be yes or no.

Ryan Murphy

I’ve always been sort of, ‘I love it,’ or, ‘I hate it,’ and I think, as a result, I’ve always been a polarizing person. You either love me or you hate me. There’s not a lot of ‘Hmmm.’

Ryan Murphy

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

Ryan Murphy

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!

Ryan Murphy

I’d never had a mentor in Hollywood. Men have always been in control of the business, and they usually mentor people who are like them – but two inches shorter.

Ryan Murphy

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.

Ryan Murphy

I think everyone wants for their children a world that’s better than the one they came up in.

Ryan Murphy

When I got my overall deal at Fox, I got amazing bosses in John Landgraf and Dana Walden and Peter Rice. For the first time ever, they said, ‘Don’t change who you are; be who you are. And write something you want to watch.’ That thing was ‘Glee,’ and it took off from there.

Ryan Murphy

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.

Ryan Murphy

It’s interesting when women direct. The work is better. They ask more people to participate.

Ryan Murphy

I’ll ask the writers’ room who they voted for Emmy awards, but I’ll never ask who they voted for president.

Ryan Murphy

Part of being an artist is being able to write about the world you live in and the times that you’ve been a part of.

Ryan Murphy

People think I’m just sort of this P. T. Barnum, razzle-dazzle guy. They think I go out of my way to be outlandish and theatrical at the expense of having emotions. They don’t get that there’s another side to me, and I keep trying to show that other side.

Ryan Murphy

When I was starting out in Hollywood, everything was such a battle.

Ryan Murphy

You can’t be the enfant terrible when you have the enfant at home.

Ryan Murphy

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

Ryan Murphy

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

Ryan Murphy

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

Ryan Murphy

I’m passionate about actors, and I’m passionate about showing actors in different lights.

Ryan Murphy

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

Ryan Murphy

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

Ryan Murphy

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

Ryan Murphy

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

Ryan Murphy

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

Ryan Murphy

I am not going to do anything unless I am afraid of it.

Ryan Murphy

I loved musicals, and I loved Barbra Streisand, and I loved Louis Malle. My tastes were very bizarre, but the thing they all had in common is that they took me out of my life and made me feel something.

Ryan Murphy

I’ve always felt I’ve related to women deeply because of being gay and feeling like there was always somebody trying to oppress me, to keep me down, to put me in my place.

Ryan Murphy

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.

Ryan Murphy

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