If you don't have a story that will hold the audience, you won't have a successful show.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning could write a poem two pages long. Could she have brought it to a music publisher?

Keep it in tune with the times, but don't write with the specific purpose of trying to create a hit. If you're doing it strictly to make money, you're crazy. There are easier ways to make money.

A song just doesn't come on. I've always had to tease it out, squeeze it out.

I began to be impressed by what made a good book-how you needed to have a sensible story, a plot that developed, with a beginning, a middle, and an end that would tie everything together.

Love is the reason for it all.

In a show or a movie, one must work with many people. Many women just don't have the time for it.