Quotes by Dorothy Fields

• Love is the reason you were born.
• My father assigned me to keep his scrapbooks. At first I was interested in reading only his rave notices, but I got interested in reading what the critics were saying about whether the play was good or not.
• No thesaurus can give you those words, no rhyming dictionary. They must happen out of you.
• The songwriter mustn't fall in love with his own song. If it doesn't belong, he can't push it into a show. Let him save it; maybe it'll fit in another show.
• Write what you feel. Write because of that need for expression.
• We've accumulated a lot of things over the years and many things from our grandmother. Hopefully it'll be all right. I really don't want to cry, but I can't help it.
• Keep it in tune with the times, but don't write with the specific purpose of trying to create a hit. If you're doing it strictly to make money, you're crazy. There are easier ways to make money.
• A song just doesn't come on. I've always had to tease it out, squeeze it out.
• If you don't have a story that will hold the audience, you won't have a successful show.
• I don't care how good a song is - if it holds back the storyline, stalls the plot, your audience will reject it.
• I do not think men have more talent. There are a great many women in the arts; novelists, painters, sculptors, poets-but the proportion is far lower in the field of song writing.
• I began to be impressed by what made a good book-how you needed to have a sensible story, a plot that developed, with a beginning, a middle, and an end that would tie everything together.
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning could write a poem two pages long. Could she have brought it to a music publisher?
• A song must move the story ahead. A song must take the place of dialogue. If a song halts the show, pushes it back, stalls it, the audience won't buy it; they'll be unhappy.
• A rhyme doesn't make a song.
• A songwriter should have friends who are similarly interested; should move about in the milieu of work he has chosen for himself.