“Everything else is relative levels of hell.”

I’ve been very fortunate as a composer to be involved with projects that have really propelled my scores forward. I’m very proud of it.

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.

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

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.

I’m a Buffalo wing magnet, a sandwich fanatic, a cheesesteak guy. But I’ll only get a cheesesteak in Philadelphia. No one else does it right.

My style of comedy is more self-deprecating. I think that makes me more relatable. When you deal with ‘topics’ – race, white versus black – you’re not separating from the pack. You’re doing what everybody else is doing.

The day you stop doing the small things is the day you think you’re above everybody else.

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.

There won’t be any hearsay. There won’t be any expert analysis from anybody else. It will be the real deal.

I want to be respected as a guy who knows what he’s talking about. And that, to me, holds more weight than anything else.

I want them to be good people, so good people will treat them accordingly. I preach that to my kids and everything else falls into place.

Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but the mark of a fake messiah.