Donna Lynne Champlin

“Since I play piano, I can play the right hand on the accordion, no problemo. It's the left hand with the buttons that makes me crazy.”

“I decided to make a CD that I would enjoy listening to. So I would finish a song and sit there, and I would say, 'What song, of all the songs I know, would I like to work on now? What song would make me happy?' And that's how I picked the songs.”

“When you are in the musical theater and you are someone who looks like me, you are constantly bending yourself, bending your voice to fit the job they've given you.”

“The schedule on TV is crazy. You could not work for two days but then work from 4 A.M. to 1 A.M. the next day. I definitely wanted more family time.”

“As a gold-card-carrying member of the nerd herd, I'm usually in the artsy, fringy, PBS-y kind of shows that change maybe five people's lives forever while leaving everyone else wondering if they can still make the ticket lottery at 'Wicked.'”

“As an actor, you do feel very powerless... you are at the whim of the agent who submits you for a project, and then at the audition, you are at the whim of the casting director who will cast you or not.”

“My first job ever was selling balloons with my brother at parades when I was about six years old. My father wanted us to learn about money, how to make it, save it, spend it, etc.”

“It's so much worse to live in regret in your forties than it is to take a chance in your late twenties.”

“I don't usually see my type for on-camera stuff as a series regular. Normally, my type is the janitor, the secretary, the cop, or the nurse.”

“The people who succeed are those who are aware of the rules; they respect the rules. But they make up their own rules. They create for creative sake.”

“It's very rare for me to come across a script for NYMF that is truly its own animal. That's really what appealed to me about 'Valueville.' I still have my notes from when I first read it.”

“It's very limited what women who look like me can do on television. You don't often see 'my type' on television unless she's a sidekick - certainly not a three-dimensional series regular who is pertinent to the plot.”

“There's pre-production, and the second part is when you start rehearsal. Pre-production was a very large learning curve for me.”

“If you miss something in the theater, you are working through it; you'll get it tomorrow. It's easy to forgive yourself in the theater. On television, you do one shot. All you've done rehearsal-wise is be blocked. There is all this pressure to get it right then.”

“If I could say anything to anybody out there thinking of creating their own content is to always, always, come from a place of authenticity.”

“I am actually a soprano. No one knows this.”

“About six months after I moved to New York City, I was literally down to my last twenty dollars when a friend of mine from college got me a job at an Upper East side gym. I ran the cafe, and I was the janitor. It was an unfortunate combination of duties, to say the least.”

“'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend' and Paula are alternatives to what we, as plus-size women in America, have been told is our narrative, which is, you should be hating yourself or hating others for how you look.”

“What I miss about the theater is the live experience.”

“I was a judge for the 2014 NYMF season. I've done it for a few years. They send you a certain amount of scripts and scores, and you rank them.”