Quotes from Alan Menken

The Disney tradition - number one, it's a great American classic tradition - and it's something where you don't want to go over certain lines. You want to poke fun, but you don't want to poke fun in a way that's hurtful.

I'm not intimidated by embracing a familiar form and what's familiar about it and making it my own. It is, I think, one of my gifts.

Every time I play 'Part of Your World,' a whole part of my life comes back to me. It's just inescapable - it was an innocent time, and a sense of discovery that we were all involved with.

The act of writing a song involves a degree of letting go of yourself, and that's very much being a child.

My first success was 'Little Shop of Horrors,' and I had been working for years on jingles.

When Peter Schneider first approached me about adapting 'Sister Act' for the stage, it wasn't a slam dunk to say yes.

There was a jingle house called Lucas/McFaul in New York, and they called me 'the demo king.' I almost never had the big final - in jingles, you have the big final, and then you sing on it, and you make a good deal of money.

For a brief period, I had a gentleman's farm in Pennsylvania, but even then, I kept a place in New York.

When I was younger, I'd get very invested in things. It's a hard lesson to learn, but you have to know that if you want to find gold, you've got to love the process of digging.

I'm an architect. Before you start pouring the concrete, you build a foundation that is solid so that when you take the scaffolding down, it holds - forever. So that when junior high schools are doing 'Hunchback,' a 12-year-old as Frollo still works on some level.

There's plenty of examples of films where they're greenlit to move forward, and they want to get X actor. And they don't get X actor, so they go with Y, and it doesn't turn out to be as good of a movie as it should have been.

TV is a medium where I've been an outsider for the most part.

I see my songs and shows almost like a mosaic - part of a bigger picture.

Songs should have an infectious melody and rhythm.

I work in a dramatic context, meaning we write with a lot of character specifics, a lot of story specifics. There's a lot of architecture in our songs.

Most things that I write are in very specific forms. A score will have a shape and profile, and then the more emotional and intimate moments will come.

I have lots of personal feelings of my own, but at this stage in my life and career, I'm very much driven by assignment.

There's such a rich trove of unheard Howard Ashman lyrics that we're so blessed to draw from.

I'm a very style-driven composer, and I like to give every project its own unique stamp.

Having a tradition is a great thing to work within, and maybe today [it] is the only way to really land musically dramatic work.

As a kid, I loved classical music. Composers like Beethoven were like rock stars to me. Then there were the real rock stars: The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and Bob Dylan.

I have a team who I respect immensely, so if they have opinions, I'm interested in hearing them.

Often my best work comes from somebody trying to stretch me in a direction that I wouldn't normally want to go in. It's not something I fight at all.

I think the thing that strikes you when you come back to 'The Little Mermaid' after all of these years is the simplicity and innocence. That's in the look of it, and that's in the sound of it.