“Refugees come to us seeking asylum, seeking freedom, justice and dignity – seeking a chance just to breathe. And people in our country are saying close the doors and don’t let them in?”
“Too often, we think that, when we have a problem with our lives or our country, that the way to fix it is to take an eye for an eye. That doesn’t help anything or anyone.”
“I’ve been very blessed in my personal life and in my career and I have never been ungrateful for what I have.”
“I have the strength from my mother, the survivability. I have wonderful qualities from my mother – but please, Mother, forgive me – I heard judgment constantly about my father.”
“I feel like I know so little, and I just hope I get to live so long. I came to puberty late; it’s all been late.”
“The gift I have to give to my fellow countrymen and people around the world, the facts are the Muslim community are our gift. They are the fabric of what makes America great.”
“I desperately want to see the day today and do the best I can not miss a shred of sunlight. It’ll be over before I know it.”
“I belong on the stage. I love how the day’s events, whatever you read in the newspapers or watch on the TV, are reflected in the performance and how it’s received.”
“If I have a tombstone when it’s all over, it will say, ‘He tried to connect.’”
“I just want other people to know the kind of joy that I have in my life. I want other people to be able to have fun.”
“My dream has come true, now that I have passed it on.”
“Isaac and I are going to Israel to ride for peace enviromental justice and a safer world for us all.”
“But I loved the theatre and I was just doing theatre 24/7 and kept dropping courses because I didn’t have the time and the chancellor thought that wasn’t a good idea after awhile.”
“I wanted to go to a liberal arts college, I wanted to have that experience.”
“We did a different show every night. We’d open a show, and then two weeks later we’d open the next show. And two weeks later we’d open the third show until we had all eight running. And it was just one of the richest experiences I’d ever had in my theatrical life.”
“I’m active in PAX, which is a gun awareness organization. We treat gun safety as a public health issue.”
“I’m on the board of directors for Peace Now, which works tirelessly between the Palestinians and the Israelis to create peace in the Middle East and we’ve never been closer.”
“I’m a spiritual person, I’m an America, I’m a Jew, and all of those things influence every breath I take, everywhere I go.”
“Everything I experience influences everything I do.”
“I try to say something about the human condition whenever I can when I’m lucky.”
“I try to get that across in the work, to try to, if I’m lucky, to make this world a little bit better for all of us before I check out. And that’s if I’m lucky, I don’t always get to have that privilege but I try always.”
“Well, I’m not a critic, I’m just a worker. So, I’m always grateful for anything the critics say – good or bad.”
“I love my work, I love the people I work with, I do the best I can.”
“Sondheim is the Shakespeare of the musical theater world.”
“I don’t want people to sit and process the song. I want them to just let them bathe over them.”
“The best work I can do is to take myself as much as I can out of it and get it as simple as I can.”
“I can achieve that by personally relating the words that I am saying to something I have known in my life.”
“When you work on a text of a lesser quality, as the interpreter or the delivery person, you are obliged to try to fill it out as you see so many people do in lesser work.”
“You rarely pay the rent by doing Shakespeare or Ibsen.”
“I’m just an actor. I am nothing special.”
“Our actions are the ground we walk on.”
“My sense of religion is Einstein’s sense of relativity. I don’t believe in God. I believe that energy never dies. So the possibility exists that you might be breathing in some other form of Moses or Buddha or Muhammad or Bobby Kennedy or Roosevelt or Martin Luther King or Jesus.”
“I got married because I wanted to do something that was more than I understood, because my feelings were more than I understood.”
“In my prayers every day, which are a combination of Hebrew prayers and Shakespeare and Sondheim lyrics and things people have said to me that I’ve written down and shoved in my pocket, I also say the name of every person I’ve ever known who’s passed on.”
“The great love of my life is music.”
“Movies were a struggle for me – they didn’t come easy.”
“I have no problem with violence, I have no problem playing horrible people.”
“If you told me I could only do one thing, I would choose live concerts.”
“There’s something about singing that I just love. It makes me feel freer than anything in the world.”
“People on both sides of any conflict believe they are right, whether it’s on a TV show or in the real world.”
“I think it’s fair to say I’m attracted to playing characters who are rather intense.”
“I’m an obsessive person. I like intensity.”
“I’m an obsessive hiker and I do it every day for two hours and it really helps me when it comes to learning songs or scripts.”
“My mom was a great cook and great baker all her life.”
“Singing in Yiddish was a great thrill for me and came about through Joe Papp, the founder of The Public Theater.”
“I’m Jewish and I can sing and I’m alive.”
“I’m lyrically driven, I’m not musically driven.”
“So I’m truly an actor who sings, and not a singer who acts.”
“The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I’m doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.”
“If I hear a lie in my life with my children, with my wife, my work, my audiences, I want to annihilate myself, vaporize myself and wipe myself off the face of the earth.”
“During ‘Chicago Hope,’ I never let directors talk to me, because I was so spoiled. I started off with people like Milos Forman, Sidney Lumet, James Lapine, unbelievably gifted people. So there I was, saying, ‘Don’t talk to me, I don’t want your opinion.’ I behaved abominably.”
“One of the greatest gifts that ‘Homeland’ has given me is it’s affirming on a daily basis.”
“The biggest public mistake I ever made was that I chose to do ‘Criminal Minds’ in the first place.”
“My inner motivation is to make the world a better place; the bad guy and the good guy think the same thing.”
“If you’re sick, watch funny movies.”
“I don’t know what’s going to happen in life, so I don’t think it’s fair that I know what’s going to happen in ‘Homeland.’”
“I still have the sword of Inigo Montoya – it’s mine!”
“The songs I love to sing are story songs, from Yiddish songs to Tom Waits.”
“It’s what Shakespeare’s mission was – to illuminate our thoughts and struggles and bring about the possibility of getting the most we can out of a day as opposed to least in this brief moment we’re here.”
“When I’m on the road with concerts, people ask me to autograph my CDs, but more and more they come up with the cookbooks.”
“I have never been asked to be in a movie musical. Other than ‘Yentl,’ which I didn’t sing in.”
“If a movie musical came along and the part was right and somebody wanted me to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat.”
“The great fun for me is these collaborators. I’m nothing by myself. Being with these people, whether it’s the ‘Homeland’ cast or stage collaborators, they make you everything you are. They make you come to work. They make you be alive.”
“My wife will tell you that if you feel my hands before I walk on for a performance, you could chill a bottle of wine.”
“I’m not frightened about terrorism. I’m frightened about the roots of what we call terrorism.”
“In the hands of good writers, you have the opportunity to present both sides of an opinion equally and that you leave it to the audience to listen and then make up their own minds.”
“I would go to war with words, not weapons. I would die talking before I lifted a weapon.”
“Peace in the Middle East isn’t going to be created by another war or violent act on the other side.”
“I grew up in Synagogue in the boys’ choir. We didn’t listen to music in the house; only at temple. Then I went to a mostly African American high school on the South Side of Chicago and joined a gospel choir.”
“Music is my balance… center of my life.”
“I moved to New York to go to Julliard Drama School. Didn’t sing a single note of music.”
“I didn’t think of myself as a singer. I’m an actor who recites words, and sometimes that happens to be on musical notes.”
“I never publicise in advance what I’m going to be singing because I never quite know until I start. I often change my mind halfway through. I sometimes throw in stuff about politics or Shakespeare or do songs in Yiddish.”
“Actually, the language in Shakespeare is wonderfully musical. You need to hear the music to connect with the words.”
“I’m a Jew. I’m fascinated by our culture and our history, by what made us the people we are. It influences every breath I take. It informs and guides me. Without it, I’d just be a vacuum.”
“I guess I am sometimes over the top on stage, but then, that is my personality. I’m over the top in real life, too.”
“I’ve always been someone who some people like and some people don’t like.”
“I’m blessed. I have a 13-year-old girl’s eye and a 14 year-old boy’s eye. I’ve been given the gift of sight by people who decided to donate organs. I try to do as much organ-donor work as I can.”
“He was a great man. He taught himself how to walk again, to write with his left hand. My father was a hero.”
“I was forced to lie to my father by doctors and relatives. I made that choice and agreed with them, and I will never, ever get over it. If I hear a lie in my life with my children, with my wife, my work, my audiences, I want to annihilate myself, vaporize myself, and wipe myself off the face of the earth.”
“I would love for Senator Cruz, and everyone creating fear mongering and hatred, to consider creating hope, optimism and love.”
“On occasion, a well-constructed drama can do what no reality or news program can do, what Shakespeare does brilliantly, is it can show both sides’ opinions.”
“I saw an interview that I did with someone, and I was horrified by it. And I said to my wife, ‘This is unbearable how I talk.’”
“I’m in a constant state of gratitude.”
“I didn’t live far from where Leopold and Loeb lived on Chicago’s South Side, so I had heard about them as a kid.”
“I did not grow up singing Yiddish.”
“It’s what great artists do. They suffer and feel more within the human condition than others. They’re not better for that, just more sensitive, and there’s a burden to that.”
“Bob Hurwitz, the president of Nonesuch, the company that releases my records, is a mentor. He taught me how to assemble a script to record an album.”
“When I was a kid, they used to say, ‘Oh man, you don’t ever wanna leave New York.’ I don’t ever want to stay in New York!”
“I just love, love going around and traveling and bringing the music to people. They just make you feel so happy that you came.”
“Even if it’s a wonderful life, you wanna go somewhere and see the way other people reflect on the world and the lives that we’re all living… I think regional theater is the life blood of our cultural lives.”
“My whole life, I feel so blessed. I met my wife: I can’t get over that I got so lucky. I have two incredible children. I can’t believe that I’ve been so blessed. I’ve had a career that is way past anything that I’ve ever dreamed. I get to work in all these different areas with such extraordinary people on every level.”
“As a young man, I think I was in a bit of the revenge business for too many years of my life.”
“The real world is far more hellish for all us than any fictional representation of it.”
“Ted Cruz ,when he was running for president, was a huge ‘Princess Bride’ fan. He would quote the lines and, you know, trying to win families and everything.”
“Sometimes, trying to make a work of art can be very difficult and very painful.”
“I think Bill Finn’s one of the geniuses of theatre, and James Lapine’s one of the diamonds of my generation. The two together are a joy!”
“It’s very frightening when you’re told you have any form of the c-word, but because of early detection, they caught it before it had hardly begun. I’m completely cured and will go on to have a wonderful, fruitful life. I’ll never die of prostate cancer.”
“I encourage all men – and all women who love their men – to make sure to get out every year, from the age of 50 on, and have PSA and DRE tests. With early detection, you can have an early cure.”
“I love the idea of giving up the vengeful nature that so many of us have.”
“Violence only perpetrates more violence, and it becomes a vicious cycle. There are political situations all over the world where there are untold acts of revenge for incidences, and thousands and thousands of lives are lost because of them.”
“Ted Cruz, who uses phrases like ‘carpet-bombing’ the people of ISIS and who said, after the incidents in Paris, that we need a war president, is using fear mongering and hate speech. As a citizen of the world, I’m very concerned that this kind of behavior is being cheered on by anyone. It only brings more pain and suffering.”
“We need to learn to accept and certainly mourn any harm that comes to any human being on this earth. But we also need to not be vengeful.”
“My favorite word was a word James Lapine used repeatedly in ‘Sunday in the Park with George,’ which was the word ‘connect.’ All I want to do is connect.”
“I saw ‘Hamilton’ when it was at the Public, and I just wept profusely in my seat because this is a form I love deeply, and to watch it be reinvented in such a genius, gifted way and executed by such a brilliant company of human beings, I was overwhelmed with not just appreciation for the piece of work itself but for the possibility.”
“I haven’t a clue what’s going to happen next, and I can’t wait to find out.”
“We must not allow the horrific actions of madmen to cut us off from our humanity.”
“We must build relationships, get to know one another’s children, open our arms rather than close our hearts.”
“Only through loving and supporting one another, even in the face of unbearable pain and suffering, will this cycle of violence end.”
“If you live close to an International Rescue Committee office in the United States, find out how you can assist a refugee family as they transition to American life. Invite a newly arrived family to your home for a welcoming meal. Listen to their hopes and dreams, and share your own.”
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