I think that both musicals and opera have a capacity to get to an inner emotional landscape.

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.

You walk a fine line between beautifully macabre and uncharacteristically psychotic.

I've never done coke or anything, and I've never played a character who has, so I don't know whether I would actually try coke if I had to play a character who took coke.

Slavery is the next thing to hell.

You can listen to what everybody says, but the fact remains that you've got to get out there and do the thing yourself.

And the pond's stillness nippled as if by rain instead is pocked with life.

Dancers are kept in a perpetual state of pre-puberty, and for young girls in particular, that type of pressure breeds insecurities.

Any sort of working drawings are simply diagrams. Architecture encourages your imagination to work that way.

I’m going to be exposed, aren’t I? (Acheron) I don’t know. You planning on dropping your pants around me? If so, warn me first. I don’t want to go blind. (Savitar)

The worst thing that can happen to a good teacher is to get a bad conscience about her profession because she feels herself hopeless as a psychologist.