David Friedman Quotes

“I have long held that there are two fundamental views of children: That they are pets who can talk, or that they are small people who do not yet know very much. The wrong one is winning.”

— David Friedman

“Part of freedom is the right of each of us to go to hell in his own fashion.”

— David Friedman

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

— David Friedman

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

— 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

“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 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'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

“My first career was as a coach and a teacher.”

— David Friedman

“I wanted to produce Nancy LaMott's albums, so I created my own record company.”

— David Friedman

“I write and direct the Duke University Children's Hospital Benefit every year.”

— David Friedman

“My career keeps shifting; I keep doing the next thing and it keeps growing.”

— David Friedman

“Songwriting is the most terrifying thing to me, because you are really laying your heart out there.”

— 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

“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

“Composition is definitely what I'm born to do, and it came last.”

— 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 think of my songs as there to be something to move people emotionally.”

— David Friedman

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

— 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 my big theater projects, which take years, and writing a song here and there.”

— David Friedman

“It sometimes feels like I'm not doing anything.”

— 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'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 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 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'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

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

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

“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