RYAN MURPHY

Originally, 'Popular' was going to be a movie.

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

Tone is everything in TV.

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.

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.

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

I love crispy, cool sheets.

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.

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

I have a maid.

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

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.

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 believe most people don't go into show business unless they've been majorly unloved as a child.

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.

I find that women are much more comfortable showing their emotion and inviting you into their emotional landscape.

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

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.

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 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 formed this thing called the Half Foundation, and what I tried to do is quantify hiring practices in Hollywood. Half the population is women, so half of the storytellers should be women. Fifty percent of all the directors in my company are women, and it will forever be that way.

I was an altar boy, with a very strict father. And movies were always my escape.

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

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.

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.