Quotes from Jason Robert Brown

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.

I am a muso, and I love doing it. I assumed that would be my career for a long time. I always wanted to be a writer, but I didn't think that anyone could actually be that full-time, so I always go back to conducting and arranging and playing. If you scratch me, I'm a musician.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

I want you and you and nothing but you--miles and piles of you! Finally, I'll have something worthwhile to think about each morning. You and you and nothing but you--no substitution will do! Nothing but fresh, undiluted and pure; top of the line and totally mine!

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.

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.

I feel like the point of being an artist is to have your own voice: to do it the way you would do it and not the way anyone else would do it. If you're a strong enough writer, then that voice is going to come out all the time, and I can't stop it from coming out, no matter what I do.