It's nice to stay up nights worrying about the material, and not about the investors who gave you $10 million to do your musical.

The musical has always been in jeopardy - until - or was in jeopardy until it was realised that it is probably the safest living theatre art form.

I don't look back. I look forward and plan new shows. That's really feeding the most important part of working in the theater.

Audiences are quite happy to be astonished, and they don't care who does that astonishing.

I have a terrible memory because I'm not interested in the past. It's done, it's done.

A star may guarantee business, but the tradeoff is a very short run.

I was there when the quote-unquote golden age of musical theater was flourishing. I met everybody who worked in theater or was famous in theater from the '40s on.

Criticism is valuable... and self-congratulatory experiences are not.

It's a terrible shame if you're born the brightest guy in your class. If you're not, then you have to hustle-and that's good.

I'm always glad to see somebody rethink something rather than reproduce something I did.

We've got to find a way to protect the process of making musical theater.

It took me quite a long time to develop a voice, and now that I have it, I am not going to be silent.

I have lived to know that the secret of happiness is never to allow your energies to stagnate.

I think all those actors from that generation, like Bogart - they were wonderful actors. They didn't act. They just came on and they did it, and the characters were wonderful.

One of the inspirations for my becoming a writer was the baseball board game Strat-O-Matic.

When you want something enough, it brings out primal emotions. You get into this place of 'must happen, must happen.'

When I am told that I am a huge star, I accept it, knowing that success is relative - the films I do have to work.

No one knows what he is doing so long as he is acting rightly; but of what is wrong one is always conscious.

I'm really fortunate. I'm really happy, and I'm really really lucky to be where I am.

I like Brad Pitt; I just have nothing to do with him.

Imperialism, in a sense, is the transition stage from capitalism to Socialism. . . . It is capitalism dying, not dead.