If I had not had music in my life, I would be the neurasthenic vision of the playwright.

I grew up at the piano, and I longed to write musicals.

No. You can't. And I can't do anything either, about my life, to change it, make it better, make me feel better about it. Like it better, make it work. But I can stop it. Shut it down, turn it off like the radio when there's nothing on I want to listen to. It's all I really have that belongs to me and I'm going to say what happens to it. And it's going to stop. And I'm going to stop it. So. Let's just have a good time.

Music expresses longing and love and joy better than any piece of dialogue you can ever write.

At the heart of the failure of most plays is the inability to carry on a thoughtful conversation about your work with yourself.

There are things that music can do that language could never do, that painting could never do, or sculpture. Music is capable of going directly to the source of the mystery. It doesn't have to explain it. It can simply celebrate it.

When ''night, Mother' opened, I did not know how long it would be before I would have another show on Broadway.