To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.

I believe that man's noblest endowment is his capacity to change.

Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.

You can sit there, tense and worried, freezing the creative energies, or you can start writing something. It doesn't matter what. In five or ten minutes, the imagination will heat, the tightness will fade, and a certain spirit and rhythm will take over.

If you're a good composer, you steal good steals.

The gift of imagination is by no means an exclusive property of the artist; it is a gift we all share; to some degree or other all of us, all of you, are endowed with the powers of fantasy.