Stephen Schwartz

“When I started working on ideas for 'Colors of the Wind,' I gave a lot of thought to the work of two lyricists who had written successful musicals about cultural conflict - Oscar Hammerstein and Sheldon Harnick. It all flowed from there.”

“So many people have told me 'The Prince of Egypt' was their favourite movie as a kid. I'm always surprised. Why? It wasn't particularly aimed at children.”

“I like long-form projects, watching something develop and come together in a team. You become incredibly close with your collaborators.”

“It's always good when a performer knows who he or she is if you know what I mean. What special qualities - and every single person, of course, is unique - what are the special qualities that he or she can bring into the room?”

“I had a very long time, a period where shows that I had done were not successful or not initially successful, and, you know, it was depressing and frustrating. But the most important trait that one can have in this business is perseverance.”

“Wizomania' is basically perpetuating the myth that there were ancient magical, wise ones in Oz, who set down all their magic in a book, but they put it in a secret language. That book is 'The Grimmerie.'”

“I had always been interested in opera, going back to my college days at Carnegie Mellon. In my last year there, I even wrote a one-act opera, which was pretty terrible.”

“I have children and I have grandchildren and my greatest fear is that the world will be a tough place for them, especially environmentally. I fear that as a species, we're going to procrastinate about dealing with our environmental challenges until it really makes a lot of trouble for the generations ahead of us.”

“I wouldn't do a project if it weren't a story I wanted to tell. That's rewarding in itself, as a writer, if you're working on a story that you enjoy telling.”

“Shows like 'Glee' and 'American Idol' have been a big boost to the whole idea of young people pursuing a singing career or a career in music, and that's been great.”

“I don't know what draws these other composers to opera, but for me, it's just this incredibly rich medium for storytelling. And no matter what I'm writing, it always comes down to telling a story with music.”

“From a philosophical point of view, if I had one song of mine that I would want to live on, it is the final song from 'Children of Eden,' 'In the Beginning.' It very strongly expresses my philosophy of life.”

“As a parent who works in showbiz, you never really want your child to go into it.”

“The idea of a sequel, I don't think it ever occurs while doing a film. A film proves popular, those are always business decisions to make a sequel and then you think about it.”

“With Bernstein, because we wound up always working music first, it was where I really feel I learned how to write lyrics as a craft.”

“I think that I care, not so much about religion as I do morality and ethics and what is our responsibility as human beings to each other and to our world. These are things I'm not alone in being concerned with and thinking about, and I do deal with that in a lot of my work.”

“While many of my musicals deal with big themes and ideas, I don't intentionally go looking to write shows like that. A story will interest me, and then somewhere along the way, I discover that hidden inside are these epic themes.”

“I was very happy in Hollywood. I was doing extremely well there and things were good.”

“That's what I like about musical theater, is that it's very collaborative, not just with the writers, but with the director and the designers and the actors. Everybody's playing in the sandbox, and ideas are coming from everywhere.”

“In some ways, writing music is an art because so much of it is instinctive and sort of below consciousness, and lyric writing is very much a craft.”