Creativity is a gift, but if you don't know how to use it you might not even know it's there. There's a lot of creativity in the air, but it's meaningless if you're not open to receiving it.

One of the reasons I love to jump back and forth between mediums is that film does allow me to be more literal. I can go to the real place. I can go to the Coliseum, and I don't have to fake it.

When I was thinking about The Lion King, I said, we have to do what theater does best. What theater does best is to be abstract and not to do literal reality.

I think we all see the world from our own little unique bubble.

I really do believe that if you don't challenge yourself and risk failing, that it's not interesting.

There is incredible power in the arts to inspire and influence.

When you break into song, it's not about dialogue, it's not about how you would speak in a naturalistic sense-it's about expressing your inner torment or your inner joy.

Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry.

What I don't have in theater is editing.

An artist is an entertainer, number one - a storyteller who takes people someplace, who gives them what they didn't know they wanted.

Limitations force you to find the essence of what you want to say, which is one of the most important things to know for an artist.

Sublime natures are seldom clean!

The air of compromise is rarely appreciated fully by men of principle. C. Vann Woodward

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

When people are facing a severe illness or a major surgery, that may be one of the most significant opportunities for spiritual transformation that they will encounter.

Prostitutes, more than any other profession, help keep American marriages together.

It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home.

Ultimately it doesn't matter whether you go forwards or backwards: you need to live your life as well as you can.

I am a child of God. I always carry that with me.

The truth is like a scalpel. The truth is painful.

True counselors of despair are those who hope against hope—and historical experience—that the government can and will act constructively.