"I feel that I speak the musical..." - Quote by Marsha Norman

“Music expresses longing and love and joy better than any piece of dialogue you can ever write.”

“When ''night, Mother' opened, I did not know how long it would be before I would have another show on Broadway.”

“People listen to music with cavemen ears: Is it a bird song or the call of a lion? The audience at a musical is dancing in their hearts.”

“In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by thehuman voice,--take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance,--which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.”

“The reading of the song is vital. The written word is first always . . . first. Not belittling the music, but it really is a backdrop. To convey the meaning of a song you need to look at the lyric and understand it.”

“My father had a piano that was a nickelodeon - put a nickel, and the roller would play.”

“When asked how she knows when her writing is where she wants it to be: "I know when it's the best I can do. It may not be the best there is. Another writer may do it much better. But I know when it's the best I can do. I know that one of the great arts that the writer develops is the art of saying, 'No. No, I'm finished. Bye.' And leaving it alone. I will not write it into the ground. I will not write the life out of it. I won't do that."”

“I want to be an artist, not... a celluloid aphrodisiac.”

“I pay tribute to the writing always. The writer is a creative artist and the director is an interpretive artist and the actors are interpretive. You take zero and make it into something, that's always amazing to me.”