Art & Creativity Quote by Alan Jay Lerner

The line has the breezy cruelty of backstage wisdom: it punctures the fantasy that success is a repeatable spell and replaces it with something harsher, more liberating. Lerner, the lyricist behind My Fair Lady and a veteran of Broadway’s fickle weather, is insisting that the act itself stays stubbornly ordinary. You sit down, you make choices, you gamble on taste. The box office verdict arrives later, like a review you can’t revise.

The specific intent is almost tactical. It’s advice to writers and composers who start “writing for a hit” once they’ve had one, or who contort themselves after a failure. Lerner’s point: changing your process to chase approval is the fastest route to bloodless work. A flop is rarely the result of less effort; a hit is rarely the reward for purity. They’re siblings born of the same labor, separated by timing, casting, marketing, audience mood, and the era’s appetite.

The subtext is a dig at the industry’s retrospective mythology. Broadway loves to treat triumph as inevitability and failure as obvious—after the fact. Lerner knows the postmortems are mostly storytelling: critics and producers invent neat explanations to domesticate chance. By flattening hit and flop into the same act of writing, he re-centers craft over prophecy and ego over panic.

Context matters: mid-century musical theater was a high-stakes machine with long development cycles and brutal public judgment. Lerner’s aphorism is both a shrug and a shield—permission to keep writing honestly when the audience, inevitably, changes its mind.