Jason Robert Brown Quotes

Everything I make starts very personally.

I look at the artistic process as like experiencing the world, channeling it through your personality and sending it back out there. That's the process.

Every movie I make teaches me something. That's why I keep making them.

As an actor, I don't really think you find yourself. I mean, once you find yourself, I think it becomes boring and you become set in your ways. I think, as an actor I think it's not a bad thing but more of a gift. It's something you're always doing as an actor. You're adjusting constantly.

I'm finding things out about myself as a person - as a writer - as I write, and so are the people who listen to what I do. But they have this additional aspect of how they take the stuff that I do, and so it broadens the work, and it creates this strange connection.

I love acting it's apart of me and I try to put a little bit of myself in each of my roles.

I love to get to that place where I don't know what kind of music I'm doing; I don't know if it's any good. I don't know if it's anything. It's a big question mark. The idea is to have interesting results. That's my bottom line.

I love being a very personal singer-songwriter, but I also like being a scientist or explorer.

The thing I love most about acting is that your capacity evolves as you evolve as a human being.

I honestly just hope to continue creating music that people can relate to and connect with in a personal way.

I've been adjusting to what it means to be a songwriter, figuring out what I like about it and what I don't like about it and what it means to me as opposed to other people.

Ultimately, I don't think you can be a character who's completely alien or divorced from your own personality. It's probably true of every writer - it's probably true of every filmmaker, every songwriter - that, ultimately, every character you create is a facet of yourself.

There are people who compose from very young. That is not my case. I went discovering myself.

I feel like, for me as an artist, it takes me a while of living with the tracks and living with the body of work to realize what it's all about.

My trouble is I'm the sort of writer who only finds out what he's getting at by the time he's got to the end of it.

A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.

...start thinking of yourself as an artist and your life as a work-in-progress. Works-in-progress are never perfect. But changes can be made...Art evolves. So does life. Art is never stagnant. Neither is life. The beautiful, authentic life you are creating for yourself is your art. It's the highest art.

Heartbreak allows us to also experience joy and love but you have to walk through heartbreak to even know what joy is. Heartbreak is a constant and it is even necessary. It allows us the opportunity of introspection and exploration. Those processes are what is necessary to write and engage in the arts.

With writing music and writing songs and recording music and coming up with stuff, you need to kind of reengage that kind of inner child to come up with interesting perceptions.

On an instrument you start from one tone. In painting you start from several.

Writing, like any art, is a continuing process of discovering the infinite possibilities of Life.

I write from the place of inquiry. The first draft is a discovery period to see what I know and what I don't know. My task is simply to follow the words. There are surprises along the way. I just have to get it down. Call it the sculptor's clay.

Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.

I always said I never wanted to write about love, but then I went and did that anyway.

I've been really lucky to spend some time around actors and artists I really admire. One thing I gathered from asking a lot of questions is that part of this job and this life we've chosen is doing personal exploration in front of an audience. In a lot of ways, that's what art is: personal searching with people watching.