Stephen Sondheim
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.Collection: Family
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.Collection: Best
I'm interested in the theater because I'm interested in communication with audiences. Otherwise I would be in concert music.Collection: Communication
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.Collection: Imagination
Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Movies
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.Collection: Poetry
I chose and my world was shaken. So what? The choice may have been mistaken; the choosing was not. You have to move on.
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.
I think 'lunch' is one of the funniest words in the world.
I was raised to be charming, not sincere.
Two of the hardest words in the language to rhyme are life and love. Of all words!
The more restrictions you have, the easier anything is to write.
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.
A close-up on screen can say all a song can.
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.
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.
Math and music are intimately related. Not necessarily on a conscious level, but sure.
Nice is different than good.
I'm a great audience. I cry very easily. I suspend disbelief in two 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.
Every time one can write a self-deluded song, you are way ahead of the game, way ahead. Self-delusion is the basis of nearly all the great scenes in all the great plays, from 'Oedipus' to 'Hamlet.'
I would have been a geologist.
When the song is part of the action and working as dialogue, even two minutes is way too long.
Oscar Hammerstein was a surrogate father during all those many days, and weeks and months when I didn't see my own father.
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.
The dumbing down of the country reflects itself on Broadway. The shows get dumber, and the public gets used to them.
There's something inimical about the camera and song.
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 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.
Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.
Nowadays, there are sometimes more producers than there are people in the cast, because it takes that much money to put a show on.
I prefer neurotic people. I like to hear rumblings beneath the surface.
Everyone I used to play with has either given up or is dead.
After the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution, songs became part of the story, as opposed to just entertainments in between comedy scenes.
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.
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.
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.
Gotta watch out for directors.
By the time I was 22, I was a professional. A young and flawed professional, but not an amateur.
When the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you've written.
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.
I really don't want to write a score until the whole show is cast and staged.
So many good songs get written fast, because you know exactly what has to work.
In the Rodgers and Hammerstein generation, popular hits came out of shows and movies.
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.
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.
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.