Quotations and phrases - David Friedman

As a person, I'm not that hopeful, but somehow the hopeful part of me reveals itself through my songs.
-- David Friedman

As time goes by, I realize that I do trust the wind. And I often write my songs for myself.
-- David Friedman

Beauty and the Beast had 16 people singing 16 times over. So it sounds like a chorus of 256, but it's really 16 people.
-- David Friedman

Composition is definitely what I'm born to do, and it came last.
-- David Friedman

Corn ethanol can help in the short term, but it has serious limitations, and none of this is going to work if we don't dramatically improve the efficiency of our cars and trucks.
-- David Friedman

For Hunchback, we needed this live, gigantic choir. So we went to London and said, This is Disney! I need singers who can sing high D's, hold them for 18 seconds, and do it 60 times!
-- David Friedman

I am a completely free artist. I can really just do what I want to do. And that obviously is very important to me.
-- David Friedman

I don't like to produce albums. I hate producing albums, as a matter of fact, because I'm an obsessed mixer and I can't leave it alone.
-- David Friedman

I fought for years and spent a fortune fighting and never got anywhere.
-- David Friedman

I have a musical called Goodbye and Good Luck, based on a Grace Paley short story. I also have King Island Christmas, and there are 20 different productions of it this year.
-- David Friedman

I have been writing since I was about 20, and at first I wrote in secret and never showed anybody. I was very concerned about making a living, so I conducted.
-- David Friedman

I know a lot of people who have tremendous commercial success and they go directly for it. There's something that has always been difficult about that for me.
-- David Friedman

I look at all these actors, musicians, designers and directors who are doing all this stuff on my behalf! It's a very heartwarming feeling.
-- David Friedman

I may not be the most famous songwriter in the world, but you know a David Friedman song when you hear it. It took me a long time to appreciate that.
-- David Friedman

I publish my own music. I'm creating my own songbook. It works that way for me; I'm very independent.
-- David Friedman

I think of my songs as there to be something to move people emotionally.
-- David Friedman

I wanted to produce Nancy LaMott's albums, so I created my own record company.
-- David Friedman

I was talking to my spiritual advisor. I got a letter from somebody who said that they were about to kill themselves, but they listened to a song of mine and it saved their lives.
-- David Friedman

I write and direct the Duke University Children's Hospital Benefit every year.
-- David Friedman

I'm not comfortable singing in front of people yet. That's going to take another 100 performances.
-- David Friedman

I'm not totally altruistic. I've always had great career ambitions. But it has to come out in an organic way. If you push yourself out beyond where you are supposed to be, there's this pressure.
-- David Friedman

I'm trying to have everything that I put into the world be something that makes a difference in the way I want to make a difference.
-- David Friedman

I've been doing a lot of studying singing, and I'm thinking of recording an album containing all my old war horses and putting out a songbook at the same time.
-- David Friedman

I've been doing my big theater projects, which take years, and writing a song here and there.
-- David Friedman

I've written several deeply personal songs this year, which I really love. Some of them came out of intense sadness. This has been an extremely difficult year for me.
-- David Friedman

In the music industry, we value large success. I realized that while I would like that, that it's not what my writing is about. And if I start making it about that, it becomes impure.
-- David Friedman

It sometimes feels like I'm not doing anything.
-- David Friedman

It's an interesting line that I walk. The AIDS crisis has done a lot for my songs and made them proliferate, and my songs have contributed a lot to that cause as well.
-- David Friedman

My career keeps shifting; I keep doing the next thing and it keeps growing.
-- David Friedman

My first career was as a coach and a teacher.
-- David Friedman

Songwriting is the most terrifying thing to me, because you are really laying your heart out there.
-- David Friedman

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.
-- David Friedman

The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations.
-- David Friedman

There is no seam between my songs and myself-they really are me. It's not like I'm performing; I'm just singing stuff that I really believe.
-- David Friedman

When I got to Broadway, I conducted five Broadway shows.
-- David Friedman

When Laura Branigan recorded one of my songs, I went to Hollywood and thought I could write those kinds of songs. But I didn't want to.
-- David Friedman

When my writing really started to take off was when I made a decision that I would write only what I wanted to write, and if 10 people wanted to hear it, that's fine.
-- David Friedman

All quotations and phrases said by David Friedman including famous quotes