Top 35 Harold Prince Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Despite the successes, you remember the failures – rather lovingly.”

— Harold Prince

2. “It’s a terrible shame if you’re born the brightest guy in your class. If you’re not, then you have to hustle-and that’s good.”

— Harold Prince

3. “I really don’t spend time thinking about the past. I think about the future. I’m not stopping.”

— Harold Prince

4. “I don’t look back. I look forward and plan new shows. That’s really feeding the most important part of working in the theater.”

— Harold Prince

5. “The idea that I have to be on the same side of the fence as Dan Quayle is cruelly depressing to me, but the truth is, I believe in family values.”

— Harold Prince

6. “The idea is to work and to experiment. Some things will be creatively successful, some things will succeed at the box office, and some things will only – which is the biggest only – teach you things that see the future. And they’re probably as valuable as any of your successes.”

— Harold Prince

7. “The perfect expression of receiving a lifetime award is to be working when they’re handing it out.”

— Harold Prince

8. “I don’t like abrasion while I’m working. I don’t thrive on chaos. I enjoy what I’m doing, and it seems to work better when I am enjoying it.”

— Harold Prince

9. “I’m crazy about Dublin. If you went back 3,000 years in my ancestry you wouldn’t find a drop of Irish blood in the veins, but I love the place.”

— Harold Prince

10. “Artistic self-indulgence is the mark of an amateur. The temptation to make scenes, to appear late, to call in sick, not to meet deadlines, not to be organized, is at heart a sign of your own insecurity and at worst the sign of an amateur.”

— Harold Prince

11. “I love big, bold, truthful theater – the tradition of Victorian theater.”

— Harold Prince

12. “I was there when the quote-unquote golden age of musical theater was flourishing. I met everybody who worked in theater or was famous in theater from the ’40s on.”

— Harold Prince

13. “I was nine. I saw Orson Welles in ‘Julius Caesar.’ It was involving, emotional, imaginative. I’ve never forgotten it.”

— Harold Prince

14. “I’m a pragmatic man. I’ll veer on the dangerous side, because I love dangerous subjects, but I won’t shoot a show in the foot.”

— Harold Prince

15. “What’s missing in the musical theater is producers willing to nurture new work, raise the money and put it on.”

— Harold Prince

16. “When I was a producer, the fun of the show was waking up with a hit and enjoying the period after the show opens. The fun of a director stops the day it opens. No matter if it’s a success or a failure, it’s not a whole lot of fun anymore.”

— Harold Prince

17. “Most of the big money people don’t know what would interest an audience if you did it. They only know what interested the audience last time.”

— Harold Prince

18. “We’ve got to find a way to protect the process of making musical theater.”

— Harold Prince

19. “I remember when people actually wore coats and ties to theatre every night. They don’t anymore. It’s very different.”

— Harold Prince

20. “I have a terrible memory because I’m not interested in the past. It’s done, it’s done.”

— Harold Prince

21. “I wouldn’t want to be just pigeonholed as an extravagant director.”

— Harold Prince

22. “You think, ‘Musicals, they must always be romantic’ – You’d be surprised how few of them historically have ever been romantic.”

— Harold Prince

23. “A star may guarantee business, but the tradeoff is a very short run.”

— Harold Prince

24. “The truth is, for some absurd reason, no one is willing to admit that the interests of the producers and the theater owners are not the same.”

— Harold Prince

25. “There are wonderful composers and librettists out there. It’s the lack of creative producers that is troubling.”

— Harold Prince

26. “I didn’t go into the theater to be a producer, I went into the theater to be a director.”

— Harold Prince

27. “Nothing is staged exactly as it was, because I can’t remember – and I consider that an advantage.”

— Harold Prince

28. “Audiences are quite happy to be astonished, and they don’t care who does that astonishing.”

— Harold Prince

29. “I like to do everything you can possibly do before you go into rehearsal, because once we are in rehearsal or on the stage there will be a problem I didn’t anticipate. It’s really good to think we got it all nailed – of course you’ve never got it all nailed.”

— Harold Prince

30. “Producers want to put their music behind revivals but I don’t think that’s a good trend for the theater at all.”

— Harold Prince

31. “I always had a good time in theatre, even when shows don’t turn out as well as I’d like.”

— Harold Prince

32. “I’m always glad to see somebody rethink something rather than reproduce something I did.”

— Harold Prince

33. “It’s nice to stay up nights worrying about the material, and not about the investors who gave you $10 million to do your musical.”

— Harold Prince

34. “I’ve never been able to understand where great artists come from.”

— Harold Prince

35. “I saw ‘On The Town’ about nine times. I discovered it. I loved it. I was in college.”

— Harold Prince

36. “I really wish people – maybe it’s naive – wish people had priorities and were willing to be artistic patrons.”

— Harold Prince

37. “I’ve seen a lot of ‘Show Boats,’ but I’ve never seen the one that thoroughly satisfies me.”

— Harold Prince

38. “The musical has always been in jeopardy – until – or was in jeopardy until it was realised that it is probably the safest living theatre art form.”

— Harold Prince

39. “I don’t think there’s a defined contemporary American musical, do you?”

— Harold Prince