A well-rounded performer will listen to all kinds of music. I like classical, Middle Eastern, and rock a lot.

The word diva to me means doing something supernatural with something natural.

A show is exhausting when it stinks. It's exhausting when you have to work overtime to make something work.

I learned a long time ago from David Mamet to wipe your feet at the door, get it out on stage and then go about your life.

I played the tuba in high school. I wanted to be a member of the marching band. I thought, what can I play that has the most effect? What can I play to get people to laugh?

I think Madonna is a wonderful performer.

We're not show-business people. We have a life.

A well-rounded performer will listen to all kinds of music. I like classical, Middle Eastern, and rock a lot.

I just love chickens.

To be nominated was enough, but when I won I the Tony I just felt relief.

Smile at a stranger. See what happens.

I just create, that's what I do.

I'm totally Italian, but I'm not a diva. If you could see the way I'm dressed in daily life, that's not a diva. Appearances are so not important to me.

The theater is a tough place. It's not cushioned the way it is in film and television.

Anybody that goes to the theater, I think we're all misfits, so we ended up on stage or in the audience.

All my career, I've said this: Critics and producers think audiences want actors that only present the silhouette and hit the points in the silhouette. What I do is too dangerous.

I am in musical theatre, but it isn't necessarily what I listen to in my leisure time, do you know what I mean?

I don't listen to the contemporary pop artists. They all sound alike, anyway.

I knew when I was a kid that I had a Broadway voice. I wanted to be a rocker, because I grew up in that era of transistor radios at the beach.

I know what it means to have a leading part, and I know what it means to have a featured part.

I love what I do, and I love the audience, and I love the fact that I get to do it, and I love, I love our craft very, very, much, and it's a noble craft. We have a responsibility to it, and to the audience, and to the playwright, and to the message. I won't ever care less.

I think that Stevie Nicks is one of the greats. Steve Nicks and Grace Slick and Janis Joplin have the real rock voices, to me.

I'd love to do situation comedy - it's the best job in show business.

I'll tell you what I think in general about people who want to make their Broadway debut that are not trained stage actors. Don't they know, Broadway ain't for sissies? It is a tough gig. You are responsible, physically, mentally, emotionally, for eight shows a week, at the top of your game. It's not easy.

In America, it stands out, because it's raw, it's big, it's emotional. My face is raw, big and emotional. It didn't work for the longest time.

My favorite band was The Band, and nobody compares in my mind with The Band.

The only thing we are as actors are messengers. That's all we are. Correct? We are delivering the playwright's intention through the concept of the director. And I come on stage; if I feel confident in the role, then I give it away.

It's exhausting when you have to work overtime to make something work.

When you use music to worship you are not attempting to entertain.

Pop music, disco music, and heavy metal music is about shutting out the tensions of life, putting it away.

When I did the record, I was coming off a time when my contract had been sold and the music industry had changed a lot. I didn't understand how to make records for big labels. I was waiting for a new kind of record label to emerge.

You've got to realize. In the western world, regardless of what color you are, what title the music is, it's all played by the same notes.

Don't make music for some vast, unseen audience or market or ratings share or even for something as tangible as money. Though it's crucial to make a living, that shouldn't be your inspiration. Do it for yourself.

Whether I'm doing music or I'm walking down the street or I'm in a record store buying a record or I walk into a comic store and I'm buying comics or having a drink with my friends, it's the same me.

When rock came along the lyrics and melodies became less important and it bothered me to think that perhaps they might not regain the value they have to music - they are music.

I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.

There is no music that can't be used politically, but the motives behind the creation of that music can be non-political.

The kind of music or the kind of arrangements that I do, the kind of musicians I choose, is just what I like to hear.

If not for music, I would probably be a very frustrated scientist. It's one way to answer the question, 'What is the meaning of life?' I feel music answers it better.

Since I'm allergic to various things, the army wouldn't accept me during the war, and I got into the Office of War Information, which sent music to Europe.

My singing is my hobby. It's me and my brother. We just enjoy writing music.

I was determined to carve out a music of my own. I didn't want to copy anybody.

I have tried to make the music a bit easier for them to understand.

What makes my approach special is that I do different things. I do jazz, blues, country music and so forth. I do them all, like a good utility man.

That music and the lyrical aspects of Razorblade Romance is so personal to me that, now with me being grown up a bit and meeting new people and doing new things, it makes me look at the same things I was writing about back in the day through a different colored lens.

The only time I would like to see was the 20s and 30s in America because I love the music and the style and the optimism, I wanted to see New York being built. I wanted to see all that, you know.

My big love was the Beatles. I was more into music.

When we started making electronic music I imagined that the reaction we got from the rock musicians must have been similar to the one the beat groups got from people like my dad.

Uhm, I'm the one wanting the lessons! I don't want to say too much about it because I'd rather have you see the movie, but he's trying to find his music.