“I learned early on that you do yourself a disservice trying to replica...” — Samuel Ervin Beam Quote

“I learned early on that you do yourself a disservice trying to replicate the record onstage every night. As a player, and for the audience I think, it's a mistake.”

“Me, I'm a lazy bum, so I don't shave.”

“All my songs usually borrow from my own life but pull from fantasy or other people's stories that you hear, or something you read. It's fun as a writer to pull from all those different places, and to connect them. But also, I don't have an interesting enough life to strictly pull from that.”

“To take the ugly language out of 'Ragtime' is to sanitize it, and that does it a great disservice.”

“There will always be a part of me that wants to do a movie musical. I feel like you're doing yourself a disservice when you say something like that, because you never know if that thing is gonna come along and be right, but I'd be lying if I said that that wasn't true.”

“I'm definitely not making movies solely for myself. That's something that I hear people say in the past, all they care about is that they like what they're making. They don't care what other people think. I think that's a disservice to the project and to the people that are working on it.”