Quotes from Donna Lynne Champlin

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Phyllida Lloyd is probably the sweetest person on the planet.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.