Quotes By Stephen Sondheim

The movie adaptations of stage musicals that I've seen, without exception, in my opinion don't work. A lot of people would disagree with me.

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.

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

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.

One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music.

The fact is popular art dates. It grows quaint. How many people feel strongly about Gilbert and Sullivan today compared to those who felt strongly in 1890?

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.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

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.

I fell into lyric writing because of music. I backed into it.

I played the organ when I went to military school, when I was 10. They had a huge organ, the second-largest pipe organ in New York State. I loved all the buttons and the gadgets. I've always been a gadget man.

Every writer I've ever spoken to feels fraudulent in some way or other.

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.

There's something inimical about the camera and song.

Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.

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

So many good songs get written fast, because you know exactly what has to work.

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.

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.

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.

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