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

My father assigned me to keep his scrapbooks. At first I was interested in reading only his rave notices, but I got interested in reading what the critics were saying about whether the play was good or not.

A song must move the story ahead. A song must take the place of dialogue. If a song halts the show, pushes it back, stalls it, the audience won't buy it; they'll be unhappy.

Write what you feel. Write because of that need for expression.

The songwriter mustn't fall in love with his own song. If it doesn't belong, he can't push it into a show. Let him save it; maybe it'll fit in another show.

A songwriter should have friends who are similarly interested; should move about in the milieu of work he has chosen for himself.

A rhyme doesn't make a song.

Love is the reason you were born.

No thesaurus can give you those words, no rhyming dictionary. They must happen out of you.

I do not think men have more talent. There are a great many women in the arts; novelists, painters, sculptors, poets-but the proportion is far lower in the field of song writing.

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

There aren't more lady songwriters for the same reason that there aren't more lady doctors or lady accountants or lady lawyers; not enough women have the time for careers.

We've accumulated a lot of things over the years and many things from our grandmother. Hopefully it'll be all right. I really don't want to cry, but I can't help it.

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.

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

The man in our society is the breadwinner; the woman has enough to do as the homemaker, wife and mother.

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

I don't care how good a song is - if it holds back the storyline, stalls the plot, your audience will reject it.

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.

I'm in the mood for love, simply because you're near me. Funny, but when you're near me I'm in the mood for love.

I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change.

The successful establishment of a buffer zone around Fort Carson will provide an example for other bases around the country as we seek to protect the training mission of the U.S. military while preserving critical habitats on our ranges.

I'll tell you what I did need to learn was tolerance, and I think I've been actually given a daily opportunity to practice that, and it's - it's - and I know that that sounds almost like a backhanded slap, and it is in a way because I haven't been successful at it every day.

I am always successful in my work.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

When I meet successful people I ask 100 questions as to what they attribute their success to. It is usually the same: persistence, hard work and hiring good people.

I don't know if there is any one secret to successful writing, but one important step is to move beyond imitation and discover what you can write that no one else can - that is, find out who you are and write that in an appropriate narrative and style.

Belief in oneself is one of the most important bricks in building any successful venture.

To judge between good or bad, between successful and unsuccessful would take the eye of a God.

If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable.

The successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way.

I don't think there has been any increase in sophistication in the audience. When people are aware of a concept that's easy to understand, and there's an actor who will attract them to the theater and it's a movie that's funny three-quarters of the time, it will be successful.

The magic formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat customers like guests and employees like people.

Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.

And in Iraq we tried to implement the same policy that was so successful in Saudi Arabia, but Saddam Hussein didn't buy. When the economic hit men fail in this scenario, the next step is what we call the jackals.

The secret of the truly successful, I believe, is that they learned very early in life how not to be busy. They saw through that adage, repeated to me so often in childhood, that anything worth doing is worth doing well.

I find that the very things that I get criticized for, which is usually being different and just doing my own thing and just being original, is the very thing that's making me successful.

I think that somebody with the resources and innovation and the idea is going to come out of nowhere and come up with a successful space travel program.

Behind every successful man is a woman, behind her is his wife.

Schools are successful only insofar as they reduce the dependence of a child's opportunities upon his social origins.

I think that I've still not been successful at playing the role of the retired actor, and I'd like to work on that.

There is no person in this room whose basic rights are not involved in any successful defiance to the carrying out of court orders.

My favorite characters are the ones that are the most successful movies.

He or she must be successful in economic terms, but always within an ethical framework. Whether his or her constituency is a corporation and its shareholders or the customers in a small and privately held business, his or her first responsibility is to serve that constituency.

There are people who make things happen, there are people who watch things happen, and there are people who wonder what happened. To be successful, you need to be a person who makes things happen.

There are a lot of people who think that's what's needed to be successful is always being right, always being careful, always picking the right path.

For our welfare reform efforts to be successful, we must empower local charitable organizations with the resources to address their local community needs.

The number one secret of being a successful writer is this: marry an English major.