Top 77 Quotes & Sayings by Harold Prince - Page 2

When I was a 25-year-old kid, I raised $260,000 for my first show, 'The Pajama Game,' in such a homemade, pathetic, endearing way - a buck here, a buck there.

I really wish people - maybe it's naive - wish people had priorities and were willing to be artistic patrons.

I don't know why the guys with the big money don't find five terrific young producers and give each of them enough to commission a musical and to live on for a year. You'd be likely to get at least one project with a future.

I don't think there's a defined contemporary American musical, do you?

The truth of the matter is that I have lasted a long time, and with it comes both good and bad things. One of the good things is that no one can ever take my career away from me. No one can ever say, 'You can't be in the theater any more.'

The truth is, for some absurd reason, no one is willing to admit that the interests of the producers and the theater owners are not the same.

There are wonderful composers and librettists out there. It's the lack of creative producers that is troubling.

All these actors who died before I was born, all the theaters and the artistic movements - all that stuff fills you up and makes you feel like you're the inheritor of all this information and of all its passion.

We've got to find a way to protect the process of making musical theater.

Ethel Merman would stay with a show for years and tour with it. So would Mary Martin, the great stars. They recognized the value of that success and nurtured it. Now, you come from Hollywood, you play 12 weeks and go away. I don't think that's the best policy.

Nothing is staged exactly as it was, because I can't remember - and I consider that an advantage.

It's a terrible shame if you're born the brightest guy in your class. If you're not, then you have to hustle-and that's good.

I like to do everything you can possibly do before you go into rehearsal, because once we are in rehearsal or on the stage there will be a problem I didn’t anticipate. It’s really good to think we got it all nailed - of course you’ve never got it all nailed.

When I was a producer, the fun of the show was waking up with a hit and enjoying the period after the show opens. The fun of a director stops the day it opens. No matter if it's a success or a failure, it's not a whole lot of fun anymore.

Producers want to put their music behind revivals but I don’t think that’s a good trend for the theater at all.

I have a terrible memory because I'm not interested in the past. It's done, it's done.

I'm a pragmatic man. I'll veer on the dangerous side, because I love dangerous subjects, but I won't shoot a show in the foot.