Patti LuPone

“The theater is a tough place. It's not cushioned the way it is in film and television.”

“My favorite band was The Band, and nobody compares in my mind with The Band.”

“Nothing has ever come easy for me.”

“My favorite composers are the ones that tell the story. I love Wagner. I love Mahler. Prokofiev. The programmatic music. I listen more to classic rock because I don't like the contemporary music very much.”

“A show is exhausting when it stinks. It's exhausting when you have to work overtime to make something work.”

“I knew when I was a kid that I had a Broadway voice. I wanted to be a rocker, because I grew up in that era of transistor radios at the beach.”

“Let me say I was trained at Juilliard. I have a very high standard. I expect everybody around me to work equally as hard because people pay a lot of money for tickets. They demand the best that we have.”

“What's the difference in opening from scratch in Philly or opening from scratch in New York? The old out-of-town tryout circuit - taking the show pre-Broadway to cities like Boston, New Haven, Philadelphia, Washington - has sort of been replaced with the amount of workshops we do.”

“New York seems to be thriving, which I'm grateful for. But I would hope that they would figure out how to negotiate the traffic and limit the pedicabs, because it seems to me that it's becoming a more chaotic city.”

“I learned a long time ago from David Mamet to wipe your feet at the door, get it out on stage and then go about your life.”

“I wish I could have a recurring role on 'Modern Family'. I think 'Modern Family' is the best comedy on television. It's extremely well written, extremely well acted and directed.”

“Anybody that goes to the theater, I think we're all misfits, so we ended up on stage or in the audience.”

“I love what I do, and I love the audience, and I love the fact that I get to do it, and I love, I love our craft very, very, much, and it's a noble craft. We have a responsibility to it, and to the audience, and to the playwright, and to the message. I won't ever care less.”

“We're not show-business people. We have a life.”

“Smile at a stranger. See what happens.”