Ryan Murphy

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

I'm not interested in anything but emotionally driven stories; that's why almost all of my work is exclusively anchored by women.