Donna Lynne Champlin

“Phyllida Lloyd is probably the sweetest person on the planet.”

“To this day, I am so grateful I grew up in Rochester, New York.”

“My brother Mike is the hardest working person I know.”

“When Melissa McCarthy came out with 'Bridesmaids,' all of a sudden you saw a plus-sized woman who had three dimensions, was not an appendage, was pivotal to the plot.”

“No matter who you are, and no matter what you've accomplished, I have yet to meet someone who doesn't still feel like they're banging their head against some wall over something in their way.”

“One of the most amazing things about 'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend' is that every song is an original. There are no covers. I think 'Glee' had to deal with forcing covers into their plotlines. That can be difficult to pull off.”

“I would absolutely love to do a revival of 'Bury the Dead' by Irwin Shaw on Broadway, but it would have to be Joe Calarco's version that we did Off-Broadway at The Transport Group in 2008. It was just one of those amazing shows that didn't run long enough and not nearly enough people got a chance to see.”

“The toughest thing for me is doing on-camera stuff as a comedian.”

“The difficult thing with mental illness is that there's no one to blame. You can't blame a person who's mentally ill, because they didn't ask for it! There's no choice to it.”

“It seems the more I play Jane Austen, the more poetic my writing becomes. The other day, I left a Post-it note for my husband that had the word 'ergo' on it. I gotta rein it in before I get all full out Madonnannoying.”

“A musical, in its true form, is where emotions reach a height where true spoken word cannot be enough, and you must sing. That's all it is. It's not posh; it's not out of your reach. It's the most visceral way to tell a story.”

“Not a lot of people know it, but I don't have any qualms about saying it - there's a lot of mental illness that runs in my family.”

“With shows with plus-sized characters, there are all of these lines of being jealous at so and so or mad at so and so for being skinny and their great diets. It's so all-encompassing and exhausting. I'm not saying that's not some women, but it's just not all of us.”

“Acting I never worried about, but it's so strange that on-camera work is so much more technical than theatre work, which I would have never thought in a million years.”

“I've become accustomed to not being cast for television and film because of how I look.”

“Logistically, working on a television show and hitting your mark and leaning to your right and knowing where the camera is - I literally felt like I was on another planet.”

“I've had a lot of therapy in my life.”

“Support women directors. When a play opens, and it's by a woman, put your money down.”

“I think with 'Hamilton,' Lin-Manuel has really blown up the whole casting idea. It's miraculous. You look at '1776,' it's a bunch of old white guys and old white chicks. You look at 'Hamilton,' and it's just the faces of America.”