Quotes By Stephen Sondheim

My mother wanted me off her hands. She was a working woman. She designed clothes, and she was a celebrity collector. It's my mother's ambition to be a celebrity.

I would have been a geologist.

If people have split views about your work, I think it's flattering. I'd rather have them feel something about it than dismiss it.

I prefer neurotic people. I like to hear rumblings beneath the surface.

Math and music are intimately related. Not necessarily on a conscious level, but sure.

By the time I was 22, I was a professional. A young and flawed professional, but not an amateur.

A close-up on screen can say all a song can.

You can't have personal investors anymore because it's too expensive, so you have to have corporate investment or a lot of rich people.

Lyrics have to be underwritten. That's why poets generally make poor lyric writers because the language is too rich. You get drowned in it.

I love the theater as much as music, and the whole idea of getting across to an audience and making them laugh, making them cry - just making them feel - is paramount to me.

I firmly believe lyrics have to breathe and give the audience's ear a chance to understand what's going on. Particularly in the theater, where you have costume, story, acting, orchestra.

On stage, generally speaking, the story is stopped or held back by songs, because that's the convention. Audiences enjoy the song and the singer, that's the point.

In the Rodgers and Hammerstein generation, popular hits came out of shows and movies.

When the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you've written.

The more restrictions you have, the easier anything is to write.

Nice is different than good.

Musicals are plays, but the last collaborator is your audience, so you've got to wait 'til the last collaborator comes in before you can complete the collaboration.

Nowadays, there are sometimes more producers than there are people in the cast, because it takes that much money to put a show on.

Musicals are, by nature, theatrical, meaning poetic, meaning having to move the audience's imagination and create a suspension of disbelief, by which I mean there's no fourth wall.

There's something inimical about the camera and song.

The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you'll do yourself a service.

I chose and my world was shaken. So what? The choice may have been mistaken; the choosing was not. You have to move on.

My idea of heaven is not writing.

All the best performers bring to their role something more, something different than what the author put on paper. That's what makes theatre live. That's why it persists.

Everyone I used to play with has either given up or is dead.

After the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution, songs became part of the story, as opposed to just entertainments in between comedy scenes.

One of the hardest things about writing lyrics is to make the lyrics sit on the music in such a way that you're not aware there was a writer there.

When you know your cast well and their strengths and weaknesses, you can start writing for them, just the way Shakespeare wrote for his actors.

My personal life and my artistic life do not interfere with each other.

I really don't want to write a score until the whole show is cast and staged.