Jack Viertel > Quotes

“Ike willed himself to become a baseball fan, learning the names, strengths and weaknesses, and personal quirks of the players the way he had for years come to know each member of each ensemble he had led or played in. The game began to fascinate him because of its natural kinship with music, the nine-man ensemble pulsing toward and away from home plate with every pitch, each of them sent spinning into action when the ball was hit, moving with a practiced virtuosity no different from a brass section handing off a melody to the strings as a song moved from section to section. Lil kept score and rooted hard for the Mets, but to Ike, it was just a new kind of music, and, when played well, a beautiful thing to watch. Perhaps it could even fill a void. 12.”
― Jack Viertel, Broadway Melody

“And yet,” he almost whispered after another long pause, “we just keep wanting. Or I do, or did, and I think, because I got so little of what I wanted for so long . . . I just kept wanting. And that doesn’t seem unreasonable to me in a fair world—it’s just a condition of life,”
― Jack Viertel, Broadway Melody

“...the history of the Broadway musical is the history of short Jewish men yelling at each other.”
― Jack Viertel, The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built

“It was as if the songs had become a part of her—full of expectation and heartbreak and loneliness and fulfillment—but none of it was real. They were only songs.”
― Jack Viertel, Broadway Melody

“I’m willing to learn how to do something I don’t know how to do, but I’m not willing to be an amateur.”
― Jack Viertel, Broadway Melody

“you see, when I was young, I wanted so much, so many people, so many young men I saw and so much that I could imagine, wanting a world I didn’t have, wanting people, wanting some kind of ecstasy.”
― Jack Viertel, Broadway Melody

“Some part of everybody needed a whore, or needed something—a secret, a private place, a life inside of life.”
― Jack Viertel, Broadway Melody