Quotes by Stephen Sondheim

• Nice is different than good.
• The dumbing down of the country reflects itself on Broadway. The shows get dumber, and the public gets used to them.
• 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.
• Oscar Hammerstein was a surrogate father during all those many days, and weeks and months when I didn't see my own father.
• So many good songs get written fast, because you know exactly what has to work.
• My personal life and my artistic life do not interfere with each other.
• 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?
• The more restrictions you have, the easier anything is to write.
• 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 nice thing about doing a crossword puzzle is, you know there is a solution.
• 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.
• There's something inimical about the camera and song.
• Nowadays, there are sometimes more producers than there are people in the cast, because it takes that much money to put a show on.
• 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.
• When I was growing up, there was no such thing as Off-Broadway. You either got your show on or you didn't.
• Everyone I used to play with has either given up or is dead.
• 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 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.
• 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.
• I prefer neurotic people. I like to hear rumblings beneath the surface.
• 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 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.
• 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.
• Every writer I've ever spoken to feels fraudulent in some way or other.
• I was raised to be charming, not sincere.
• 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.
• 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.
• In the Rodgers and Hammerstein generation, popular hits came out of shows and movies.
• 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.
• By the time I was 22, I was a professional. A young and flawed professional, but not an amateur.
• Math and music are intimately related. Not necessarily on a conscious level, but sure.
• Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.
• 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.
• Gotta watch out for directors.
• 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.
• 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.
• When the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you've written.
• Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.
• 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.
• A close-up on screen can say all a song can.
• After the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution, songs became part of the story, as opposed to just entertainments in between comedy scenes.