It's an interesting line that I walk. The AIDS crisis has done a lot for my songs and made them proliferate, and my songs have contributed a lot to that cause as well.

I've written several deeply personal songs this year, which I really love. Some of them came out of intense sadness. This has been an extremely difficult year for me.

I have a musical called Goodbye and Good Luck, based on a Grace Paley short story. I also have King Island Christmas, and there are 20 different productions of it this year.

I don't like to produce albums. I hate producing albums, as a matter of fact, because I'm an obsessed mixer and I can't leave it alone.

As time goes by, I realize that I do trust the wind. And I often write my songs for myself.

It's an interesting line that I walk. The AIDS crisis has done a lot for my songs and made them proliferate, and my songs have contributed a lot to that cause as well.

I may not be the most famous songwriter in the world, but you know a David Friedman song when you hear it. It took me a long time to appreciate that.

When my writing really started to take off was when I made a decision that I would write only what I wanted to write, and if 10 people wanted to hear it, that's fine.

Corn ethanol can help in the short term, but it has serious limitations, and none of this is going to work if we don't dramatically improve the efficiency of our cars and trucks.

I'm not comfortable singing in front of people yet. That's going to take another 100 performances.

As a person, I'm not that hopeful, but somehow the hopeful part of me reveals itself through my songs.

There is no seam between my songs and myself-they really are me. It's not like I'm performing; I'm just singing stuff that I really believe.

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.

I've been doing a lot of studying singing, and I'm thinking of recording an album containing all my old war horses and putting out a songbook at the same time.

I write and direct the Duke University Children's Hospital Benefit every year.

I fought for years and spent a fortune fighting and never got anywhere.

When I got to Broadway, I conducted five Broadway shows.

I'm trying to have everything that I put into the world be something that makes a difference in the way I want to make a difference.

I know a lot of people who have tremendous commercial success and they go directly for it. There's something that has always been difficult about that for me.

I was talking to my spiritual advisor. I got a letter from somebody who said that they were about to kill themselves, but they listened to a song of mine and it saved their lives.

Composition is definitely what I'm born to do, and it came last.

In the music industry, we value large success. I realized that while I would like that, that it's not what my writing is about. And if I start making it about that, it becomes impure.

I'm not totally altruistic. I've always had great career ambitions. But it has to come out in an organic way. If you push yourself out beyond where you are supposed to be, there's this pressure.

It sometimes feels like I'm not doing anything.

My first career was as a coach and a teacher.

I think of my songs as there to be something to move people emotionally.

I've been doing my big theater projects, which take years, and writing a song here and there.

I have been writing since I was about 20, and at first I wrote in secret and never showed anybody. I was very concerned about making a living, so I conducted.

My career keeps shifting; I keep doing the next thing and it keeps growing.

I publish my own music. I'm creating my own songbook. It works that way for me; I'm very independent.

I wanted to produce Nancy LaMott's albums, so I created my own record company.

Songwriting is the most terrifying thing to me, because you are really laying your heart out there.

For Hunchback, we needed this live, gigantic choir. So we went to London and said, This is Disney! I need singers who can sing high D's, hold them for 18 seconds, and do it 60 times!

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.

Nor should we exclude the possibility that Islamic terrorism may begin to make common cause with Western political extremists of the far Left and far Right.

We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.

Our income are like our shoes; if too small, they gall and pinch us; but if too large, they cause us to stumble and trip.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

To believe in a just law of cause and effect, carrying with it a punishment or a reward, is to believe in righteousness.

I wish I knew at 14 not to put much thought into what other people my age said to me, cause we were all looking for the answers. So I wish I knew that other people really don't know any more than you do!

One of the things that has always motivated me to write is the desire to get it out and look at it in an objective way, so that it doesn't cause me any serious pain by staying inside.

There are nuclear weapons in China, Iran, Korea and Pakistan. It wouldn't take much to send a couple of warheads off on this planet somewhere that would cause a lot of environmental damage, then if you have got someone who wants to retaliate you have real problems.

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.

You have to not listen to the nay sayers because there will be many and often they'll be much more qualified than you and cause you to sort of doubt yourself.

A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope.

While some no other cause for life can give, but a dull habitude to live.

The intelligence investigation under the leadership of Senator Church, which I know has helped cause this investigation by you, points out that the agencies did not disclose certain facts to us and that certain plots were going on.

I accept extinction as best explaining disjoined species. I see that the same cause must have reduced many species of great range to small, and that it may have reduced large genera to so small, and of families.

The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.