Dorothy Fields Quotes

• I might as well play bridge with my old maid aunts I haven’t got a chance This is a fine romance.

  Dorothy Fields

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• Grab your coat, and get your hat, Leave your worry on the doorstep, Just direct your feet To the sunny side of the street.

  Dorothy Fields

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• Write what you feel. Write because of that need for expression.

  Dorothy Fields

• 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.

  Dorothy Fields

• There aren’t more lady songwriters for the same reason that there aren’t more lady doctors or lady accountants or lady lawyers; not enough women have the time for careers.

  Dorothy Fields

• 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.

  Dorothy Fields

• No thesaurus can give you those words, no rhyming dictionary. They must happen out of you.

  Dorothy Fields

• 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.

  Dorothy Fields

• Love is the reason you were born.

  Dorothy Fields

• 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.

  Dorothy Fields

• In a show or a movie, one must work with many people. Many women just don’t have the time for it.

  Dorothy Fields

• If you don’t have a story that will hold the audience, you won’t have a successful show.

  Dorothy Fields

• I don’t care how good a song is – if it holds back the storyline, stalls the plot, your audience will reject it.

  Dorothy Fields

• 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.

  Dorothy Fields

• 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.

  Dorothy Fields

• Elizabeth Barrett Browning could write a poem two pages long. Could she have brought it to a music publisher?

  Dorothy Fields

• A songwriter should have friends who are similarly interested; should move about in the milieu of work he has chosen for himself.

  Dorothy Fields

• 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.

  Dorothy Fields

• A song just doesn’t come on. I’ve always had to tease it out, squeeze it out.

  Dorothy Fields

• A rhyme doesn’t make a song.

  Dorothy Fields

Dorothy Fields (21)

Birth:	15th July, 1905
Death:	28th March, 1974
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Lyricist

About

Dorothy Fields was born in  Allenhurst, New Jersey. She was an American lyricist. She wrote over 400 songs for Broadway musicals and films. Along with Ann Ronell, Dana Suesse, Bernice Petkere, and Kay Swift, she was one of the first successful Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood female songwriters. Fields's career as a professional songwriter took off in 1928, when Jimmy McHugh, who had seen some of her early work, invited her to provide some lyrics for him for Blackbirds of 1928. Songs from this period include "I Can't Give You Anything But Love", "Exactly Like You", and "On the Sunny Side of the Street." In the 1950s, her biggest success was the show Redhead, which won five Tony Awards, including Best Musical.

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