Musical Writing Quotes

I'm writing a musical. I am. I was able to buy the rights to 'The Preacher's Wife,' which starred Whitney Houston... I'm writing a whole new score and all the lyrics for it.

I don't know what really makes a great musical or not. In the end, you write it, and you write it because you want to write it.

I think that if I have one hope, 1 ambition, 1 aspiration for the next 4 or 5 years it would be that I can improve as a writer and just be able to say more of what I want to say throught the music.

I only know how to write musicals.

If you write enough musicals you pretty much have a sense of where they should go, what you'll need, and when; how to pull people on that journey.

I want to do a musical. I want to write a book. I have all these ideas and I can't get away from them.

When it comes to writing musicals, you write the best piece you can. Then, its destiny is in the hands of the actors and the director.

I want to write musicals for my whole life. I always did.

The book works better if I know everything I can about the ending. Not just what happens, but how it happens and what the language is; not just the last sentence, but enough of the sentences surrounding that last sentence to know what the tone of voice is. I imagined it as something almost musical. Then you are writing toward something; you know the sound of your voice at the end of the story. That's how you want to sound in those final sentences: the degree that it is uplifting or not, the degree that it is melancholic or not.

I think I started writing because no one had ever told me you can write about the things you know in a musical. They don't have to come from some far off place.

Deciding what is to be sung and what is not to be sung is really what writing a musical is about.

I could hear music playing in the background of works by certain authors, like Poe and Shakespeare. And I discovered Nikki Giovanni when I was in eighth grade. Her writing has a musical energy with pulse and rhythm, almost like jazz or hip-hop.

You have to understand the medium you're writing for. People jump into writing musicals without realizing how complicated they are. Knowing one form doesn't necessarily mean you know the other. You have to be comfortable with it.

We love 'Fiddler.' We love 'West Side Story.' I want to be in that club. I want to be in the club that writes the musical that every high school does.

I really wanted to do, more than anything else, up until I was around 16, 17, was write musicals.

Alice Ripley was someone who had had a huge effect on me when I had gotten out of college and decided that this was the road I wanted to take - to write musicals.

We decided we didn't want to do a musical for TV because the idea of writing a musical that would be seen on television once seems insane.

I love working on a typewriter - the rhythm, the sound; it's like playing the piano, which I do, too.

I am able to write musically about the visual. I can pick up tones, I can pick up themes. And I find visual art is a wonderful launching-off place.

No, writing musicals is the hardest thing in the world. And it was really funny, because I remember when the South Park movie came out, there were some critics that said, 'Well it's obvious that in order to get it to be 90 minutes they filled some time with music.'