Quotes

I remember the first time we were referred to as Comden and Green. I hated it, and not because I hated the team. Far from it. It was Frank Loesser who introduced us that way, and it felt so personal, as if we were objects and always went together with an 'and.'

[on Vincente Minnelli]: Vincente was a highly visual director. It was very important to him where an ashtray was placed; it could not be an eighth of an inch out of the way.

[working with Adolf Green and Jule Styne on the song 'Just in Time'] At one point we were talking to Jule and said, 'Wouldn't it be nice to have something in the show like an old Youmans tune - where there's two notes, but the bass keeps changing and moving under the notes, making different harmonies and moving a melody'. Very simple. Jule went to the piano and started playing a simple thing - da dee dah. He asked if that was what we meant and we said "Absolutely!"... And then he developed it, and it was a tune! Well, we all fell in love with it, but had no idea where it would go. No name, no words. A big hit at parties with Jule singing 'Da dee dah, da dee dah da dee dah'

[on Hollywood] We worked our heads off. It wasn't any swimming pools and mad nights. It was going to the office every day and working. We worked like brutes. Salt mines! All that stuff about 'Oh, yes, you'll get to Hollywood and you'll lead the lush life, and they'll slip your checks under the door' - forget it!

Adolf [Green] and I have never written popular songs you know. We have only written in connection with shows. We've never sat down and said, "Hey, let's write a song called...' and then do it to a title. So it's very hard for us to come up with a kind of song that's possibly going to be a hit. Sometimes, when everything is just working right, you may come up with the right situation, and the right thing for a character, and also come up with a hit. But why that happens, and what those elements are, I don't know exactly. In all these years we've only had three big standards...If you ever come across the secret of what makes one song a hit, and not another - call me. Immediately!

[on Leonard Bernstein] We were very close friends with Leonard. We'd known him forever. When he works on something, he works very much from a base if trying to get an entire concept, or one clue that's going to make the whole score fall into place for him. He thinks in terms of the whole show, and there's a kind of texture to his music that's unmistakably his. Nobody writes for the theatre the way Leonard does. And he never feels that, because he's doing something for the commercial theatre, he is in any sense writing 'down'.