Quotes By Stephen Sondheim

There's something inimical about the camera and song.

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

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.

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 idea of heaven is not writing.

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.

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

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.

Gotta watch out for directors.

I'm interested in the theater because I'm interested in communication with audiences. Otherwise I would be in concert music.

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

I don't listen to recordings of my songs. I don't avoid it, I just don't go out of my way to do it.

I was raised to be charming, not sincere.

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?

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

The dumbing down of the country reflects itself on Broadway. The shows get dumber, and the public gets used to them.

When I was growing up, there was no such thing as Off-Broadway. You either got your show on or you didn't.

The nice thing about doing a crossword puzzle is, you know there is a solution.

Generally, the best recording is the original cast, because that's the way the piece grew: integrally, with them.

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.

Oscar Hammerstein was a surrogate father during all those many days, and weeks and months when I didn't see my own father.

If you're dealing with a musical in which you're trying to tell a story, it's got to sound like speech. At the same time it's got to be a song.

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

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.

I would have been a geologist.