The first Broadway show I ever heard was the recording of Carousel, and it was a very vivid experience.

I'd like to one day play Amanda, the mother, in The Glass Menagerie.

I love pasta with the homemade marinara sauce I had as a kid.

I know Mama Rose is a great role and I love having a chance to do it.

In my career, there have been three things that were challenging: playing gay; playing a Jewish woman; and playing Chekhov. The scariest part was playing Chekhov!

Working on behalf of companion animals is so important. We start to realize how healing they are.

Stephen Sondheim told me that Oscar Hammerstein believed everything that he wrote. So there's great truth in the songs, and that's what was so wonderful to find.

No One Is Alone by Stephen Sondheim is all about thinking for yourself and being your own person.

The first big lead that I had on Broadway was in a show called La Strada.

We've been listening to Wagner, which is so great.

George M. is where I met my dear friend Joel Grey. We connected at rehearsal one day during a five-minute break. We were both looking out the same window and we knew in five minutes that we'd made a connection.

I love 'Some Enchanted Evening', and 'If I Loved You'. And as I sing them more and more, I find new favorites.

I feel strongly for gay marriage to be accepted.

Into The Woods was... a lot of running around in the woods! I can't wait to see the show again. People didn't realize it back then, but kids still come up to me-young people-and they talk about it. It really made its mark.

Animals speak with pure affection. It's important to me to get something going in NY so we can get to be a no-kill city, and give the animals homes and more attention and love.

When there's a terrible illness like AIDS sweeping through, you help people.

It was one of the most exciting, perfect evenings of my life, my solo debut at Carnegie Hall. And knowing we were all there to raise money for Gay Men's Health Crisis made the evening an extraordinary experience.

You've gotta be original, because if you're like someone else, what do they need you for?

You'd look out and there'd be little babies watching the show, and boys and girls. They loved the cowboys, and they loved Annie. There were young people seeing the show for the first time. I stayed for two years because I enjoyed it so much.

I don't smoke, I don't drink much, I don't eat red meat. I stay out of the sun.

Getting plenty of sleep is always great. It really is. I have a girlfriend who's sending me a slant board.

When something isn't done, you want to do something about it.

Sondheim writes the music and lyrics, and because he's so smart and goes so deep with his feelings, there's a lot to explore, get involved with and learn about.

The challenge of film is making it right there at that moment, and then you get to move on.

The first Broadway show I ever heard was the recording of Carousel, and it was a very vivid experience.

It Might As Well Be Spring... I used to sing that as a young girl in my voice lessons. Then I picked it up again and it spoke to me in a whole new way.

I lost a very dear friend who lived with AIDS for about 17 years. Rejecting early treatments that were iffy, he thought he saved himself. I really miss him a lot.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

I've danced one time in my life. It was the most mortifying experience I ever had.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.

Well, the hardest thing to do, as we know from our own experience on 9/11 is protect everything all the time.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

If you live long enough, you'll experience everything.

Actually I'd had a certain amount of experience in Europe in the inter-war period, as a banker, and I was also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Chamber of Commerce.

In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

In my fifty years of experience and memory, I have seen the most amazing increase in the standard of living of a people ever achieved anywhere in the world. This is why I am so sure that our system of free competition and industrial development is sound and must be preserved.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

It's been my experience that every time I think I know where it's at, it's usually somewhere else.