Top 43 Quotes & Sayings by James Lapine

I'm drawn to dreams.

Sometimes good news is hard to absorb.

I'd like to just say that there's nothing darker than 'Old Yeller' and 'Bambi' and some of the early Disney stuff.

That's the thing about dreams - they're ineffable. If you can get to the bottom of it, it's not a dream.

Good musicals, a strange world, seem so easy. People say, 'Ohhh, it's magic.' Nothing's magic. A thing doesn't jell. Adapt. Change the rhythm. Shorten the scene. Rewrite the character. Maneuver the waters. Seeming easy is why so many shows aren't good.

You can't be theoretical when you're building a musical.

I am an off-Broadway, nonprofit kind of guy.

The nice thing about the theatre is you can always change it. With a movie, once it's there, you're stuck with it.

I don't do movie junket-y things, because I don't really do movies that much.

When you grow up, you don't realize that your parents are any different than anybody else's. And their behavior - you have nothing to compare it to. So that is what normal is, even if it's abnormal.

If you're like me and nosy, you're always eavesdropping on other people's conversations.

Fairy tales cross generational lines, and how you respond to them depends on when in your life you're seeing them.

I did 'Impromptu,' which was a thrill and a horror all at once - my first movie and having to do it in Paris, and my wife wrote it, and I had some difficulties on the set, blah, blah, blah.

I'm a hippie child of the '60s. What drives me crazy about mass media entertainment is that it's so often devoid of any ideas.

Fairy tales, which teach a moral lesson, are about ourselves. Myth deals with forces greater than ourselves.

When you're young, you envision happiness in such an idealized way.

The music is the emotional substance of the show; the book just sets it up. Nobody goes to a musical to hear the book. That's the way it works.

I love the visual aspect of the theater. But I like what people have to say, too.

It so fascinates me how we always laugh when somebody falls on a banana peel, how comedy and injury are often so interwoven. I've always been a sucker for that.

I'm a very laid-back person.

I need an audience to look at what I've done so I can understand it, so I can step back and watch them respond and figure out what they're understanding about what I'm trying to do and what they're confused about.

I think visually... so, even when I'm writing a play, I'm envisioning it.

I am thrilled to receive the Sondheim Award from the wonderful Signature Theatre. I have already received the invaluable gift of over twenty-five years of collaboration and friendship with Steve. Now I get to have his award, too!

Some of the things I've done in my life, I've done to make money because I had to make money... and some things I did just because they were on my mind and they were of interest to me... some of the little plays I wrote.

We live in an era of reinvention: Madonna and everybody desperately trying to change their persona.

I really enjoyed writing the adaptation of 'Into The Woods.' I thought it was wonderful to not be the director, frankly. I really enjoyed that aspect of it.

I've grown more and more appreciative of good writing, and I now really hope I can become a better and better writer.

I love photography... I'd like to write a show about photography.

I like to keep a low profile.

I like the stage challenges of having somebody literally falling apart before your very eyes.

I've ended up working with Disney a lot, which is kind of peculiar. In theater, I've done a couple of projects with them and written a couple movies and whatnot.

Meryl Streep's really smart, and she's a film animal, and she knows that.

I was a youngish man entering fatherhood when we wrote 'Woods,' a patchwork of classic fairy tales with an original tale sewn in. I had dedicated my libretto to my baby daughter.

The one thing you don't want to do is go off and keep rewriting. If something's not quite right, it's often about modulating what's already there.

I just don't really think of career. I've never been driven by career.

In most audience-participation shows, the participant is so clearly not a part of what's going on that it's the fish-out-of-water aspect that makes it funny.

Most musicals are real crowd pleasers.

I'm never so into the three-act movie thing. I know that's the form that people talk about, but it seems to me, in the movie, you just have to keep charging forward. You couldn't start over again like you do after an intermission. You just had to keep the plot moving forward.

There are certain images that always haunt me.

I designed a theater magazine that was full of plays and essays about the theater, and then I worked at a theater school. By osmosis or something, I was learning from reading plays and not being analytical about them, but when I would read them, the joy in me was mostly from imagining them in my head and visualizing them.

Something I like to do is watch someone else do their thing.

When you're trying out on Broadway, it's very hectic, and you're making changes night after night. There's a lot of pressures from producers to make some changes, and you're writing for actors who are in it - and sometimes the limitations of actors who are in it.

As you get older, you realize happiness involves a lot of problems.