You don't have to patronize your audience, and you can mix art and commerce in a profound way. You can simultaneously play to the sophisticated, 60-year-old theatergoers and to 4-year-olds.

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.

Music is to the soul what words are to the mind.

When you betray your own heart, you suffer for life. Always be true to your heart!

The highest freedom of mind comes from becoming non-judgmental.

In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one's legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace.

To know oneself means above all to know what one likes

Only then, approaching my fortieth birthday, I made philosophy my life's work.

In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning.

I always thought the best kind of sunglasses are the motorcycle helmets with the black plastic masks on them. That way, nobody can recognize the back of your head either.

Nothing in the Shastras, which is capable of being reasoned, can stand if it is in conflict with reason.

Death is the advertisement, at the end of an autobiography, wherein people discover its virtues.