Meryle Secrest > Quotes

“First take a play that you like and musicalize it. Then take a play that you like but you feel has flaws and try to improve them, and musicalize it,” Sondheim recalled him saying. “Then he said, ‘Take something that is not a play but that somebody else has written, a novel or a short story, so that you don’t have to invent the characters or plot, and musicalize that, make it into a play. Dramatize it. And then finally write an original, your own story, and dramatize that.”
― Meryle Secrest, Stephen Sondheim: A Life

“an architect needed to understand “the secret that gave character to the trees.”
― Meryle Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright

“the disappearance of an audience that had supported experimentation and made such works financial, as well as critical, successes. The decline of liberal-arts teaching in schools and colleges meant that the new audience was less cultured and intellectually oriented; wedded to television and movies, it wanted to be entertained rather than challenged.”
― Meryle Secrest, Stephen Sondheim: A Life

“Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility; I chose arrogance.”
― Meryle Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright

“Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance.…”
― Meryle Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright

“To have one’s helplessness and … dependency taken advantage of by the person one loves … soon produces an interlinking of love and hate. Because anger toward the loved person cannot be expressed for fear of losing that person … Ambivalence, the interlinking of love and hate, remains an important characteristic of later object relationships. Many”
― Meryle Secrest, Stephen Sondheim: A Life

“His lifelong interest in graphics and typography was soon joined to an enthusiasm for amateur photography, and when an opportunity developed to use both, he seized it.”
― Meryle Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright

“As the decade drew to a close Wright was emerging as something between a prophet and a public scold,”
― Meryle Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright

“Herbert Sondheim had written a note, packed up his clothes, and walked out.”
― Meryle Secrest, Stephen Sondheim: A Life

“Birthdays have gotten to a point with me, however, that makes them unwarranted reminders of lost opportunities and untouched possibilities.” He was just thirty years old.”
― Meryle Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright

“Who cared how well a garment was constructed? The effect from a distance was what counted.

Luxe pauvre, meaning that the style was almost Japanese in its restrained use of color and furnishings, but combined with opulent materials.

I do not believe for a moment that women who make tremendous successes of their lives are happy. Fame for a woman is invariably built on unhappiness and disppointment.”
― Meryle Secrest, Elsa Schiaparelli: A Biography

“The real point was that it was exactly like the film Love Affair,” said Sondheim, whose frames of reference were often cinematic. “They decided they would not do anything but see in six months whether they still wanted each other. So they let six months go by and then decided that they did want to see each other, so she left her husband—even though she was a Catholic—and he left my mother.”
― Meryle Secrest, Stephen Sondheim: A Life

“Oliver Goldsmith observed, “laws grind the poor and the rich men grind the law.”
― Meryle Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright

“Consistency and order, the elimination of extraneous detail, a return to natural forms, respect for materials and unity of design: it sounded like the manifesto of a new order and it was.”
― Meryle Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright

“In common with the Woods, Wright had a vision of Arcadia, of man living in harmony with nature.”
― Meryle Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright

“Despite, or because of their faith in miraculous cures, a strain of superstitious belief ran through this proud, emotionally distant family of intellectuals.”
― Meryle Secrest, Modigliani: A Life

“the place is never ‘chosen’ by man; it is merely discovered by him;… the sacred place in some way reveals itself.”
― Meryle Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright

“Four years later, in 1956, he was proposing that the city of Chicago erect an office building on its waterfront a mile high, that is to say, approximately four times as tall as the Empire State Building, to house one hundred thousand people. This monstrous project—the drawing alone was twenty-two feet long—seemed such an anomaly, coming from Wright, that most people did not take him seriously. Lewis Mumford, the old friend with whom he was by now reconciled, was perfectly disgusted and refused to have anything to do with it. Wright’s “Sky City” died a quiet death. These”
― Meryle Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright

“I had grown up from childhood with the idea that there was nothing quite so sacrosanct, so high, so sacred as an architect, a builder,” he said in later years.”
― Meryle Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright