I’ve always liked puzzles, since I was a kid. I like party games, silly games. I loved chess. I enjoy jigsaw puzzles, but I’m not particularly visual.
They wanted me to be a concert pianist, because I had a very good right hand, but my left hand’s terrible and I hated performing.
In not-for-profit theater, you don’t worry so much about how the audience is going to react. You want to make them absorb the piece.
It’s age. It’s a diminution of energy and the worry that there are no new ideas. It’s an increasing lack of confidence. I’m not the only one. I’ve checked with other people.
Take a play that you like but you think is flawed, and see if you can improve it and turn it into a musical. Then make up your own story.
Opportunity is not a lengthy visitor.
If the end is right, it justifies the beans!
My main goal is to tell a story.
It’s not so much do what you like as it is that you like what you do.
What justifies a character singing one idea for 3 minutes on the screen? I get impatient and want the story to carry on. I don’t get impatient in the theatre.
By the time I get through writing a score, I know the book better than the book writer does, because I’ve examined every word, and questioned the book writer on every word.
I started listening to classical music when I was in my early teens. Prior to that, I listened to pop records or band records.
Everyone would like to be on Broadway, cause if a show works, you make a great deal of money and it allows you to write other shows.
Only capitalists get photographers.
White. A blank page or canvas. The challenge. Bring order to the whole Through design, composition, tension, balance, light, and harmony.
Every writer I’ve ever spoken to feels fraudulent in some way or other.
Puzzles are like songs – A good puzzle can give you all the pleasure of being duped that a mystery story can. It has surface innocence, surprise, the revelation of a concealed meaning, and the catharsis of solution.
My mother wanted me off her hands. She was a working woman. She designed clothes, and she was a celebrity collector. It’s my mother’s ambition to be a celebrity.
I like neurotic people. I like troubled people. Not that I don’t like squared-away people, but I prefer neurotic people. I like to hear rumblings beneath the surface.
I’m a lazy writer. My idea of heaven is not writing. On the other hand, I’m obviously compulsive about it.