Robert Lopez

I like to think my sense of humor is sort of smart and dumb at the same time. I like to work on multiple levels - smart and dumb, funny and sad, profound and mundane, cynical and hopeful.

With comedy, the jokes will come out, and people will see them coming. Changes in daily life or current events can change the consciousness of audiences and can make the show less funny or feel more stale.

You can never assume that something is going to do well.

It's wonderful to be able to have such wildly different projects in your body of work. They don't feel different to me as I'm working on them. It feels like they all share this element of subversiveness and finding the joy in subversiveness.

People try not to think about what's going on in sub-Saharan Africa. They edit it out of their daily lives. Especially Americans. We prefer a fantasy version of Africa.

I'm not really a 'puppet' person in particular; I think they are very theatrical, and I've found different uses for them in shows, but my true interest is in writing Broadway musicals.

I don't know any Mormon that doesn't have warm memories of their family.

People are born with the ability to make judgments. And they can't help but use the information they have to divine something about the world they're in. Making categorical judgments, in large, helps our society.

If you're doing a musical, you should be out to give the audience something special, emotional, an uplifting feeling, something that stays with them. And you're not going to do that by bumming them out.

I don't think I met an actual Mormon until college, and by that time, I was wary of them. I knew about the church through school and, secondhand, through non-Mormon friends.

It's so important, after a song is finished, to go to sleep and listen to the song with fresh ears the next day. It's sometimes a traumatic event. And playing it for someone else for the first time - that is the most nerve-wracking thing of all. But we learn so much.

This is one of my lesser moments, and one I'm not proud to admit to, but there's always a time I feel the need to have control over the process and try to defend the song from the person I'm writing with. It never, ever helps and always causes problems.