Quotes By Stephen Sondheim

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

I was raised to be charming, not sincere.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.