Quotes from Donna Lynne Champlin

My brother Mike is the hardest working person I know.

It's so much worse to live in regret in your forties than it is to take a chance in your late twenties.

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 am actually a soprano. No one knows this.

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.

When you are in the musical theater and you are someone who looks like me, you are constantly bending yourself, bending your voice to fit the job they've given you.

'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend' and Paula are alternatives to what we, as plus-size women in America, have been told is our narrative, which is, you should be hating yourself or hating others for how you look.

About six months after I moved to New York City, I was literally down to my last twenty dollars when a friend of mine from college got me a job at an Upper East side gym. I ran the cafe, and I was the janitor. It was an unfortunate combination of duties, to say the least.

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

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.

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.