Lee Tergesen Quotations

I know what it's like to be ignored, and I think that is the big problem about the prison system: These people are being thrown away. There is no sense of rehabilitation. In some places, they are trying to do things. But, in most cases, it's a holding cell.

I have always said about myself I am a survivor because I am.

I would say that playing this character has caused me to think about a lot of things. He's always questioning himself and trying to get back to something he lost touch with and trying to find forgiveness. Everybody struggles with these things to some extent in their life.

Eddie Drake is sort of this loose cannon, funny, edgy guy, who has this really foolish, foolish mustache.

As I walk around, I have met 70-year-old women who live on the Upper West Side who love the show. And I met a couple in Kansas - a couple of truck drivers who drove around together - who loved it. It's popular all over the place and definitely in the gay community.

What it made me realize was that a show like this makes people look inside themselves. Because this crew guy isn't sitting there wishing the character would fight back. He's hoping that he would fight back.

It's definitely intense to walk away from at the end of each season.

But we both came to the decision that the powerful thing is to go into your fear, walk in there with it, don't walk away from it, and to try to be true to it.

I think for Beecher specifically, Keller was with him when his wife died. Beecher had decided after he first got into prison that he had to shut off everybody. You can't let anybody in and you have to become like them and you have to be threatening and all that.

I went through a divorce right as we were starting the show. My divorce became final right after we started shooting the first year, and during that time I was in such a low place.

Wow, she is definitely walking a line, and it's either going to be great or it's going to be like, 'What is she doing?'

We have history, because he was my training officer,

I said to Jorge, 'I gotta pass.' I knew it was going to be great to do the play, and it was a blast,

I think I knew I wasn't what people looked at and saw in me. I love characters. I love things that have dimension and depth, that are hard to figure out.

When I was 21 or so, and I started to grow my hair - this was maybe two years before 'Wayne's World' - they were like 'What are you doing? ... You're such the all-American guy.' But I would go in and read for these parts, and it never excited me to play the guy who doesn't have any sort of point of view and edge,

It's not the first time I had to get in drag, ... Oz.

I knew how intense it was going to be. But as we started to make it - the first year - even crew people would say weird things to me.

I'm the court jester, ... class clown, fool.

I really don't feel like I'm being typecast,

I pretty much do what I like. There was a little concern when I first started the show from TNT that maybe I was a little too soft. They didn't really get where I was coming from, because I'm funny.

He's sort of a loose cannon with a quick wit, ... He's somebody who of course is intense. I always wind up playing somebody a little intense. Maybe I'm just intense.

I don't know if I'll ever have a job that, on so many levels, was so great, ... I was working with so many close friends, and the material was really juicy. I think we ended it at the right time, and I definitely look back fondly.

If God's in me, he's a tumor.