David Friedman

Corn ethanol can help in the short term, but it has serious limitations, and none of this is going to work if we don't dramatically improve the efficiency of our cars and trucks.

I'm not totally altruistic. I've always had great career ambitions. But it has to come out in an organic way. If you push yourself out beyond where you are supposed to be, there's this pressure.

It's an interesting line that I walk. The AIDS crisis has done a lot for my songs and made them proliferate, and my songs have contributed a lot to that cause as well.

In the music industry, we value large success. I realized that while I would like that, that it's not what my writing is about. And if I start making it about that, it becomes impure.

I was talking to my spiritual advisor. I got a letter from somebody who said that they were about to kill themselves, but they listened to a song of mine and it saved their lives.

I think of my songs as there to be something to move people emotionally.

I'm not comfortable singing in front of people yet. That's going to take another 100 performances.

There is no seam between my songs and myself-they really are me. It's not like I'm performing; I'm just singing stuff that I really believe.

I've been doing a lot of studying singing, and I'm thinking of recording an album containing all my old war horses and putting out a songbook at the same time.

I write and direct the Duke University Children's Hospital Benefit every year.

It sometimes feels like I'm not doing anything.

I'm trying to have everything that I put into the world be something that makes a difference in the way I want to make a difference.

I may not be the most famous songwriter in the world, but you know a David Friedman song when you hear it. It took me a long time to appreciate that.

When my writing really started to take off was when I made a decision that I would write only what I wanted to write, and if 10 people wanted to hear it, that's fine.

As a person, I'm not that hopeful, but somehow the hopeful part of me reveals itself through my songs.

I've been doing my big theater projects, which take years, and writing a song here and there.

I don't like to produce albums. I hate producing albums, as a matter of fact, because I'm an obsessed mixer and I can't leave it alone.

Composition is definitely what I'm born to do, and it came last.

When I got to Broadway, I conducted five Broadway shows.

My first career was as a coach and a teacher.