I didn't really want to write just lyrics, but I wanted to meet Leonard Bernstein. Music was always the first reason I was writing songs.

If I cannot fly, let me sing.

Success is like failure, It's how you perceive it, It's what you do with it, not how you achieve it.

The only reason to write is from love.

Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.

Any moment, big or small, Is a moment, after all. Seize the moment, skies may fall Any moment.

Anything you do, let it come from you. Then it will be new.

I love the theater as much as music, and the whole idea of getting across to an audience and making them laugh, making them cry - just making them feel - is paramount to me.

Musicals are, by nature, theatrical, meaning poetic, meaning having to move the audience's imagination and create a suspension of disbelief, by which I mean there's no fourth wall.

Swing your razor wide! Sweeney, hold it to the skies!

All the best performers bring to their role something more, something different than what the author put on paper. That's what makes theatre live. That's why it persists.

An old battleax of a woman said to Winston Churchill, "If you were my husband I would put poison in your tea." Churchill's response, "Ma'am if you were my wife I would drink it.

...we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.

I write not for the sake of glory. Not for the sake of fame. Not of the sake of success. But for the sake of my soul.

There’s no such thing as perfection, and even if there were, I think it’d be rather boring.

Your feelings so are important to write down, to capture, and to remember because today you're heartbroken, but tomorrow you'll be in love again.

Gambling with cards or dice or stocks is all one thing. It's getting money without giving an equivalent for it.

Once an affair is over, the cheaters need to agree not to see each other anymore in order to reestablish trust with their spouses.

Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

I would rather read poetry than eat my dinner any day. It has been so all my life.

We don't have a prayer of defeating the Red Threat of our generation without a long boom of almost unprecedented duration.