“What brought me to Disney was the new regime, which is now the old regime, came over with Michael Eisner, Frank Wells, Jeffrey Katzenberg.”

The best parts about writing a show are [its] first, second and 10th anniversaries.

If you write enough musicals you pretty much have a sense of where they should go.

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

And all these people really wanted to reinvigorate the animated musical, so they came to Howard Ashman and me. That was my entry into Disney.

And, it’s also about spurring each other on to doing really great, hard work.

So you have to do a lot of things in order for things to move forward.

So there are more songs on the stage because the songs are kind of the close up.

Whether it’s animated, whether it’s live-action, whether it’s Broadway, whether it’s television, a musical is a musical is a musical.

I don’t write songs for myself anymore. I only write songs on assignment.

I’ve always juggled a lot of projects because at least half the projects you do get shelved.

It’s purely a business, but it is still so important to me emotionally.

So, pretty much you approach the songs in pretty much the same way.

Collaboration is being open to each other’s ideas and benefiting from each other’s perspectives in an open way.

Collaboration is all about rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and helping each other to constantly improve a piece.

What you’ll need, and when; how to pull people on that journey.

It’s easier to do it in a collaboration than on your own.

My hats did give me an identity. In fact, if I had a dollar for every time someone has seen me bareheaded and said, ‘I almost didn’t recognize you without a hat on’, I could have bought the Cowboys myself.

I have brought myself, by long meditation, to the conviction that a human being with a settled purpose must accomplish it, and that nothing can resist a will which will stake even existence upon its fulfillment.

That past which is so presumptuously brought forward as a precedent for the present, was itself founded on some past that went before it.

I was brought up as a physicist.

It’s much more casual than it was, but my clothes and my ring attire – I thought up half of what I brought to the show.

We built walls around them with slits through which to fire arrows at scary, cross-eyed rural people, and brought our food and family inside because they were the safest places to be.

It is no longer an allegation, it is an established fact, even if no evidence has been brought out in order to support it.

I was a very early reader, so I was really brought up being surrounded with piles of British books and British newspapers, British magazines. I developed a really great love of England.