Jason Robert Brown

“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.”

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

“I know I'm really good at writing for the theater. I can deny it all I want. Other people can fight me on it. It doesn't really matter. It's the thing I happen to know is my gift.”

“Comedy is drama. I think that if your characters are feeling something that is very real, then they have to respond in a way that feels real to them, and some situations, the only response you could possibly have is to respond in a way that's so extreme that people are going to laugh.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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 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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Being a musician - and I like to think of myself as a musician with a capital M - you need to be an omnivore, and I think the best musicians will listen to anything and love everything, and I do.”

“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.”

“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.”