Stephen Sondheim Quotes

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.

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.

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

Success is like failure, It’s how you perceive it, It’s what you do with it, not how you achieve it.

By the time I was 22, I was a professional. A young and flawed professional, but not an amateur.

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

Oscar Hammerstein was a surrogate father during all those many days, and weeks and months when I didn’t see my own father.

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

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

I would have been a geologist.

There’s something inimical about the camera and song.

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.

White. A blank page or canvas. So many possibilities.

It’s not so much do what you like as it is that you like what you do.

Having just the vision’s no solution, everything depends on execution

Everybody faces a blank piece of paper, no matter what they’ve written or painted or composed before. I can’t imagine approaching every single new project with-without doubt.

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?

Nice is different than good.

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.

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.

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.

Any moment, big or small, Is a moment, after all. Seize the moment, skies may fall Any moment.

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.

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.

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.

Opportunity is not a lengthy visitor.

Everything depends upon execution; having just a vision is no solution.

Two of the hardest words in the language to rhyme are life and love. Of all words!

Math and music are intimately related. Not necessarily on a conscious level, but sure.

The only reason to write is from love.

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

In the Rodgers and Hammerstein generation, popular hits came out of shows and movies.

When I was growing up, there was no such thing as Off-Broadway. You either got your show on or you didn’t.

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

My main goal is to tell a story.

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.

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.

I fell into lyric writing because of music. I backed into it.

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

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.

Anything you do, let it come from you. Then it will be new.

After the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution, songs became part of the story, as opposed to just entertainments in between comedy scenes.

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.

When I’m writing a song, I try to be the character.

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’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.

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 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.

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