Quotes By Stephen Sondheim

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

My idea of heaven is not writing.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.