After the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution, songs became part of the story, as opposed to just entertainments in between comedy scenes.

Every writer I've ever spoken to feels fraudulent in some way or other.

My parents got divorced and military school gave me a structure. A lot of kids my age were children of divorced parents. They didn't know what to do with the kids.

Making lyrics feel natural, sit on music in such a way that you dont feel the effort of the author, so that they shine and bubble and rise and fall, is very, very hard to do. Whereas you can sit at the piano and just play and feel youre making art.

The situation's fraught, Fraughter than I thought, With horrible, impossible possibilities!

You have two kinds of shows on Broadway - revivals and the same kind of musicals over and over again, all spectacles. You get your tickets for 'The Lion King' a year in advance, and essentially a family comes as if to a picnic, and they pass on to their children the idea that that's what the theater is - a spectacular musical you see once a year, a stage version of a movie. It has nothing to do with theater at all. It has to do with seeing what is familiar. We live in a recycled culture.

I liked my father a lot, but I didn't see him very often because my mother was bitter about him. He remarried, and I used to have to sneak off to see him.