I certainly wanted my name in lights. I wanted my name on a marquee. I wanted recognition on Broadway.
— Stephen Sondheim
I'm a great audience. I cry very easily. I suspend disbelief in two seconds.
I have inherited my father's sense of humour about myself. It's a lot more pleasant to make fun of yourself than when someone else does.
Making lyrics feel natural, sit on music in such a way that you don't feel the effort of the author, so that they shine and bubble and rise and fall, is very, very hard to do. Whereas you can sit at the piano and just play and feel you're making art.
Every time one can write a self-deluded song, you are way ahead of the game, way ahead. Self-delusion is the basis of nearly all the great scenes in all the great plays, from 'Oedipus' to 'Hamlet.'
I was essentially trained by Oscar Hammerstein to think of songs as one-act plays, to move a song from point A to point B dramatically.
When the song is part of the action and working as dialogue, even two minutes is way too long.
I'm interested in the theater because I'm interested in communication with audiences. Otherwise I would be in concert music.
The fact is popular art dates. It grows quaint. How many people feel strongly about Gilbert and Sullivan today compared to those who felt strongly in 1890?
I chose and my world was shaken. So what? The choice may have been mistaken; the choosing was not. You have to move on.
When I was growing up, there was no such thing as Off-Broadway. You either got your show on or you didn't.
You can't have personal investors anymore because it's too expensive, so you have to have corporate investment or a lot of rich people.
If you're dealing with a musical in which you're trying to tell a story, it's got to sound like speech. At the same time it's got to be a song.
In the Rodgers and Hammerstein generation, popular hits came out of shows and movies.
I really don't want to write a score until the whole show is cast and staged.
Musicals are plays, but the last collaborator is your audience, so you've got to wait 'til the last collaborator comes in before you can complete the collaboration.
I firmly believe lyrics have to breathe and give the audience's ear a chance to understand what's going on. Particularly in the theater, where you have costume, story, acting, orchestra.
Everybody faces a blank piece of paper, no matter what they've written or painted or composed before. I can't imagine approaching every single new project with-without doubt.
I don't find my life that interesting. The shows, maybe. But not me.
I happen to like movies and plays about dislikeable people as long as I get to know why they are what they are.
Two of the hardest words in the language to rhyme are life and love. Of all words!
When I'm writing a song, I try to be the character.
Every single song I've ever written is sung by a character created by somebody else. Some might have a jaundiced view of love, some don't. But none of these songs is me singing - not a single one.
I think 'lunch' is one of the funniest words in the world.
On stage, generally speaking, the story is stopped or held back by songs, because that's the convention. Audiences enjoy the song and the singer, that's the point.
Nice is different than good.
Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.
The dumbing down of the country reflects itself on Broadway. The shows get dumber, and the public gets used to them.
The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you'll do yourself a service.
One of the hardest things about writing lyrics is to make the lyrics sit on the music in such a way that you're not aware there was a writer there.
The more restrictions you have, the easier anything is to write.
When you know your cast well and their strengths and weaknesses, you can start writing for them, just the way Shakespeare wrote for his actors.
By the time I was 22, I was a professional. A young and flawed professional, but not an amateur.
Lyrics have to be underwritten. That's why poets generally make poor lyric writers because the language is too rich. You get drowned in it.
I have, by nature, an analytical mind.
I'm very opinionated about movie musicals when they're adapted from live shows. You'll sit still for a three-minute song in a theater. But in movies, a glance from someone's eyes will tell you the whole story in a few seconds.
If you force yourself to write away from the piano, you come up with more inventive things. If you're too good a piano player, as some composers are, the music may become flavorless and glib. And if you're not a very good pianist, you're limited to the same patterns.
I was a mathematician by nature, and still am - I just knew I didn't want to be a mathematician. So I decided not to take any mathematics courses.
I'm always conscious of what I'm writing, conscious of what the actor may ask me. I have a defense for nearly every line in the song.
My parents weren't around much, but I assumed everybody's family was the same. I didn't know people had mummies and daddies who would give them milk and cookies after school. I just thought everybody lived on Central Park West and they had a nanny to take care of them.
I love the theater as much as music, and the whole idea of getting across to an audience and making them laugh, making them cry - just making them feel - is paramount to me.
My idea of heaven is not writing.
I was raised to be charming, not sincere.
My personal life and my artistic life do not interfere with each other.
Nowadays, there are sometimes more producers than there are people in the cast, because it takes that much money to put a show on.
Every writer I've ever spoken to feels fraudulent in some way or other.
I don't listen to recordings of my songs. I don't avoid it, I just don't go out of my way to do it.
So many good songs get written fast, because you know exactly what has to work.
When the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you've written.
Gotta watch out for directors.
