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"I really don't want to write a score until the whole show is cast and staged."
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"You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say."
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"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."


"I played the organ when I went to military school, when I was 10. They had a huge organ, the second-largest pipe organ in New York State. I loved all the buttons and the gadgets. I've always been a gadget man."


"If people have split views about your work, I think it's flattering. I'd rather have them feel something about it than dismiss it."


"Oscar Hammerstein was a surrogate father during all those many days, and weeks and months when I didn't see my own father."


"Musicals are, by nature, theatrical, meaning poetic, meaning having to move the audience's imagination and create a suspension of disbelief, by which I mean there's no fourth wall."


"By the time I was 22, I was a professional. A young and flawed professional, but not an amateur."
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