I was not popular in school, and I was definitely not a ladies' man. And I had a very painful adolescence, because it was all very strange to me. It wasn't like I got beat up, but the humiliation and isolation, and the existential 'God, I exist, and nobody cares' of being a teenager were extremely pronounced for me.

I wanted to drag Shakespeare from obscurity. I've been a fan my whole life.

Stories come from violence, they come from sex. They come from death. They come from the dark places that everyone has to go to, kind of wants to, or doesn't, but needs to deal with. If you raise a kid to think everything is sunshine and flowers, they're going to get into the real world and die. That's the reason fairy tales are so creepy, because we need to encapsulate these things, to inoculate ourselves against them, so that when we're confronted by the genuine horror that is day-to-day life we don't go insane.

Captain, I think you have a problem with your brain being missing.

The way a musical can make us feel is unlike anything else, in song and particularly in dance. I think people fly through plate-glass windows when they get shot because movies don't have dance scenes any more. This is what we do instead.

This landing is gonna get pretty interesting. Define "interesting". "Oh God, oh God, we're all going to die"? [on speakerphone]: This is the captain: we have a little problem with our entry sequence so we may experience some slight turbulence, then explode.

What's plan b?' 'We all die now.' 'What's plan c?