Jason Robert Brown Quotes

It's about one moment. It's about hitting the wall and having to make a choice, or take a stand, or turn around and go back.

I don't come from a musical family at all, but I realized early on I was a musician. I started begging for a piano when I was 6 years old.

I never wanted to write 'Mamma Mia!' or 'The Book of Mormon' - they're not my thing, I don't care about them. What I do is very different.

Writing music and lyrics, you tend to become a control freak - sitting alone in your room with a bare light bulb over your head, writing communist manifestos.

What's great about collaborating is getting to work with wonderful people. That's what theatre is about: other people getting you to give your best, and getting everyone else's best out of them.

When I started out, I wanted to be Billy Joel. The plan was to be a singer-songwriter of that ilk, and, then, I got waylaid - that's probably an unfair way to say it - from being a rock star by the musical theatre stuff, which I love doing.

In terms of my religious preference, if a year goes by and I don't have a Seder or I don't light the menorah, I feel a loss.

What I aspire to do, and what I try the hardest to do, is write stuff that's very personal in its way. I figure I can only say things the way I say them, so I'm trying to do something that is kind of anti-generic.

As much as I can act, I don't have anything in me that yearns to be an actor - that sense of needing to be onstage, in costume, in character; that is utterly not interesting to me.

I grew up in the '70s, and I hear in my own stuff a lot of what I grew up listening to, which is to say I hear a lot of Billy Joel, Paul McCartney, Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder.

The jury is still out on whether I'm a genius or not.

My work is very popular with performers, and there are theatre people who get what I'm doing and what tradition I'm working in. I'm very grateful to them - they're my people, who understand why I work the way I do.

I love my stuff - you're not supposed to say that. But because I'm performer as well as a writer, I'm constantly interacting with my own work. I always get to find these little secrets that I left for myself, little notes - I find them all over the scores.

Actually, if you ask my really close friends, they would say that 'Honeymoon' is more me than anything else I've written.

There are actors I have very strong chemical responses to, and I strive always to figure out ways to work with them and get them to sing my stuff.

Leonard Bernstein was probably the most significant formative influence on me - he was such an encompassing musician. I spent my teenage years absorbing him, and my other interests stemmed off of that. Bernstein led me to Sondheim and to Gershwin, and Sondheim led me to listening to Joni Mitchell.

It is scary to write - period - for me, but once you get past the idea that it's scary to write, I still can only be who I am. As a writer, my job, to me, is to expose myself - to really sort of dig in and find out who I am and then put it on the page.

I did musicals in high school, certainly. And then I just kept wanting to do them. I felt at home in the theater, in that way that, you know, you're supposed to if that's the kind of person you are.

I find I like the spotlight for a very brief period of time ... and I sort of need it. But then, the minute that it's done, I have to sort of go hide. So I was never really meant, I think, to be a performer for a living.

I think that when you write for stars, I think that you have to be very specific about what they do beautifully and let them bring it to life.

You're supposed to be a control freak when you're an artist. That's the whole point of having a vision: Why have one if you're not going to protect it?

Maybe I'd see how you could be so certain that we had no chance...at all.

I write about outsiders. I write about people who are outside and don't know quite how to get in because it's how I've always felt.