Quotes By Stephen Sondheim

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Nice is different than good.

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.

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.

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

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