Top 100 Stephen Sondheim Quotes
#1. 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.
Stephen Sondheim
#2. I was essentially trained by Oscar Hammerstein to think of songs as one-act plays, to move a song from point A to point B dramatically.
Stephen Sondheim
#3. I'm before him on my knees, and he kisses me He assumes I lose my reason and I do. Men are stupid, men are vain, Love's disgusting, love's insane, A humiliating business-oh how true.
Stephen Sondheim
#4. Puzzles are like songs - A good puzzle can give you all the pleasure of being duped that a mystery story can. It has surface innocence, surprise, the revelation of a concealed meaning, and the catharsis of solution.
Stephen Sondheim
#5. Making lyrics feel natural, sit on music in such a way that you don't feel the effort of the author, so that they shine and bubble and rise and fall, is very, very hard to do. Whereas you can sit at the piano and just play and feel you're making art.
Stephen Sondheim
#6. I have inherited my father's sense of humour about myself. It's a lot more pleasant to make fun of yourself than when someone else does.
Stephen Sondheim
#7. In not-for-profit theater, you don't worry so much about how the audience is going to react. You want to make them absorb the piece.
Stephen Sondheim
#9. For anyone approaching any one of the cast albums, if they don't like what they hear, it's not the performer's fault.
Stephen Sondheim
#11. I've always preferred actors who sing to singers who act in all the shows I've done.
Stephen Sondheim
#12. Over a period of time it's been driven home to me that I'm not going to be the most popular writer in the world, so I'm always happy when anything in any way is accepted.
Stephen Sondheim
#13. Into the woods
you have to grope,
But that's the way you learn to cope.
Into the woods to find there's hope
Of getting through the journey.
Stephen Sondheim
#14. It should be interesting to see two entirely different ways to treat a story, geared for two entirely different kinds of audience.
Stephen Sondheim
#15. The nice thing about doing a crossword puzzle is, you know there is a solution.
Stephen Sondheim
#17. My parents weren't around much, but I assumed everybody's family was the same. I didn't know people had mummies and daddies who would give them milk and cookies after school. I just thought everybody lived on Central Park West and they had a nanny to take care of them.
Stephen Sondheim
#18. It's not so hard to be married, I've done it three or four times.
Stephen Sondheim
#19. Music straightjackets a poem and prevents it from breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric. Poetry doesn't need music; lyrics do.
Stephen Sondheim
#21. I started listening to classical music when I was in my early teens. Prior to that, I listened to pop records or band records.
Stephen Sondheim
#22. The concerts you enjoy together/ Neighbors you annoy together/ Children you destroy together,/ That keep marriage in tact.
Stephen Sondheim
#23. Teaching is a sacred profession. And art is a form of teaching.
Stephen Sondheim
#26. If you force yourself to write away from the piano, you come up with more inventive things. If you're too good a piano player, as some composers are, the music may become flavorless and glib. And if you're not a very good pianist, you're limited to the same patterns.
Stephen Sondheim
#28. I really don't want to write a score until the whole show is cast and staged.
Stephen Sondheim
#29. If you told me to write a love song tonight, I'd have a lot of trouble. But if you tell me to write a love song about a girl with a red dress who goes into a bar and is on her fifth martini and is falling off her chair, that's a lot easier, and it makes me free to say anything I want.
Stephen Sondheim
#30. Everyone would like to be on Broadway, cause if a show works, you make a great deal of money and it allows you to write other shows.
Stephen Sondheim
#31. Any moment, big or small, Is a moment, after all. Seize the moment, skies may fall Any moment.
Stephen Sondheim
#32. Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.
Stephen Sondheim
#33. Anything you do, let it come from you. Then it will be new. Give us more to see ...
Stephen Sondheim
#35. There's a hole in the world like a big black pit who are filled with people who are filled with shit.
Stephen Sondheim
#36. Hit songs did not come out of musicals. Pop-rock was creating the hits. There were very few songs that made the charts out of any Broadway musical.
Stephen Sondheim
#37. 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.
Stephen Sondheim
#38. After the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution, songs became part of the story, as opposed to just entertainments in between comedy scenes.
Stephen Sondheim
#40. A song is such a short form ... that 'the slightest flaw seems like a mountain.' And so every song needs to be revised 'til it's close to perfection ... But achieving perfection takes a lot of energy.
Stephen Sondheim
#41. Friendship, obligation and greed are not good enough reasons to write anything.
Stephen Sondheim
#42. Into the woods you go again You have to every now and then Into the woods, no telling when Be ready for the journey Into the woods, each time you go There's more to learn of what you know.
Stephen Sondheim
#43. 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.
Stephen Sondheim
#44. Math was my big interest when I was in prep school. I was considering taking math in college, and majoring in it.
Stephen Sondheim
#45. My parents got divorced and military school gave me a structure. A lot of kids my age were children of divorced parents. They didn't know what to do with the kids.
Stephen Sondheim
#47. Unless the object of the singer's affection is a vampire, surely what Hart means is unphotogenic. Only vampires are unphotographable, but affectionate '-enic' rhymes are hard to come by.
Stephen Sondheim
#48. Every single song I've ever written is sung by a character created by somebody else. Some might have a jaundiced view of love, some don't. But none of these songs is me singing - not a single one.
Stephen Sondheim
#49. Musicals are so expensive to put on the stage that you have to have the backing of a corporate, you have to have Universal Studios or Disney or somebody to put in the money.
Stephen Sondheim
#50. I've always liked puzzles, since I was a kid. I like party games, silly games. I loved chess. I enjoy jigsaw puzzles, but I'm not particularly visual.
Stephen Sondheim
#51. Take a play that you like but you think is flawed, and see if you can improve it and turn it into a musical. Then make up your own story.
Stephen Sondheim
#53. My personal life and my artistic life do not interfere with each other.
Stephen Sondheim
#54. I'm a lazy writer. My idea of heaven is not writing. On the other hand, I'm obviously compulsive about it.
Stephen Sondheim
#56. By the time I was 22, I was a professional. A young and flawed professional, but not an amateur.
Stephen Sondheim
#57. Best to take the moment present as a present for the moment ...
Stephen Sondheim
#59. Ah, but if you have no expectations, You can never have a disappointment.
Stephen Sondheim
#60. I took piano lessons when I was 6. I didn't want to go on with it. I don't remember being moved by a piece of music.
Stephen Sondheim
#61. Every writer I've ever spoken to feels fraudulent in some way or other.
Stephen Sondheim
#62. You move just a finger, say the slightest word, something's bound to linger-be heard.
Stephen Sondheim
#63. I do not dwell on dreams I know how soon a dream becomes an expectation How can I have expectations? Look at me, No, Captain, Look at me, Look at me!
Stephen Sondheim
#64. Oh if life were made of moments Even now and then a bad one
! But if life were only moments, Then you'd never know you had one.
Stephen Sondheim
#65. If I got involved with the chat rooms and Facebook and everything - I would probably never leave. That's why I don't do it. I literally don't do it. At all.
Stephen Sondheim
#67. I like murder mysteries, the Agatha Christie kinds of things where you know that it's all going to be neatly wound up at the end.
Stephen Sondheim
#68. We lose things.
And then we choose things.
And there are Louis's
And there are Georges-
Well, Louis's
And George.
Stephen Sondheim
#69. Everyone tells tiny lies, what's important really is the size.
Stephen Sondheim
#70. I happen to like movies and plays about dislikeable people as long as I get to know why they are what they are.
Stephen Sondheim
#71. By the time I get through writing a score, I know the book better than the book writer does, because I've examined every word, and questioned the book writer on every word.
Stephen Sondheim
#72. Pointillism takes emotional images, character, etc., and makes them all come together and make a whole that tells a story.
Stephen Sondheim
#73. Almost all the shows I've been connected with have been extremely well cast. They're playing the show, not just doing the songs.
Stephen Sondheim
#74. I'm a great audience. I cry very easily. I suspend disbelief in two seconds.
Stephen Sondheim
#75. I don't like the word 'career'. When somebody says to me, 'oh, you've had such a wonderful career', I think, 'career - that's after you're dead.' I just don't think that way.
Stephen Sondheim
#77. I'm sure many writers have these strange, tiny little habits.
Stephen Sondheim
#78. 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.
Stephen Sondheim
#79. I'm always conscious of what I'm writing, conscious of what the actor may ask me. I have a defense for nearly every line in the song.
Stephen Sondheim
#80. You have to be submitted for the Pulitzer, and unbeknownst to us, a choral director whom I know had submitted us.
Stephen Sondheim
#81. The more restrictions you have, the easier anything is to write.
Stephen Sondheim
#82. I love computers. I love writing on them. I love gadgetry. The thing is: I am a slow reader. So, if I am going to get my work done, I read, like, a newspaper and that's it. If I got into websites and the internet, I wouldn't get any work done.
Stephen Sondheim
#84. It's your father's fault that the curse got placed and the place got cursed in the first place.
Stephen Sondheim
#86. Perpetual anticipation is good for the soul but it's bad for the heart.
Stephen Sondheim
#87. Stop worrying where you're going. Move on. If you can know where you're going, you've gone. Just keep moving on.
Stephen Sondheim
#89. Now, this one might be a little stringy, but then again, it's fiddle player."
That isn't fiddle player, it's piccolo player."
How can you tell?"
It's PIPING hot!"
Then blow on it first!
Stephen Sondheim
#90. White. A blank page or canvas. The challenge. Bring order to the whole Through design, composition, tension, balance, light, and harmony.
Stephen Sondheim
#91. I don't write songs apart from theatrical pieces. I'm not interested in writing songs qua songs.
Stephen Sondheim
#92. Am I not sensitive, clever, well-mannered, considerate, passionate, charming, as kind as I'm handsome and heir to a throne?
Stephen Sondheim
#93. Work is what you do for others, liebchen. Art is what you do for yourself.
Stephen Sondheim
#94. I'm very opinionated about movie musicals when they're adapted from live shows. You'll sit still for a three-minute song in a theater. But in movies, a glance from someone's eyes will tell you the whole story in a few seconds.
Stephen Sondheim
#95. The difference between a cow and a bean is a bean can begin an adventure.
Stephen Sondheim
#96. I didn't really want to write just lyrics, but I wanted to meet Leonard Bernstein. Music was always the first reason I was writing songs.
Stephen Sondheim
#98. 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.
Stephen Sondheim
#99. I was a mathematician by nature, and still am - I just knew I didn't want to be a mathematician. So I decided not to take any mathematics courses.
Stephen Sondheim
#100. 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.
Stephen Sondheim
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