Stephen Sondheim Quotes
After the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution, songs became part of the story, as opposed to just entertainments in between comedy scenes.
Quotes to Explore
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Tori Amos had a major influence on how I craft words in a song.
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I started getting really interested in comedy when I was in middle school.
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There was a film called 'FM,' and we were asked to do the title song. And I said, 'Does it have to have any specific words?' And they said, 'No, it just has to be about FM radio.' It took a day or two to write.
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There's something different that happens when you're writing a song for your own record that you know you're going to sing.
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I actually love doing comedy!
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As in any technological revolution, there will be winners and losers. On balance, everyone will come out ahead, although there will be particular companies that will not be able to cope with a new environment.
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From the stage, I can reach a large audience, and you learn from being on stage how much a song reaches, what extent of the crowd a song can reach. I write in a way that can reach most of the audience, but I also wanted to have truly intimate moments as well, many intimate moments, more so than the big moments.
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Wayne and Drake, it takes them so long to do a song. I understand why, because they want it to be perfect. But I think I can do a perfect song in 10 minutes.
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I still want to do a romantic comedy or a western or a gritty independent film... there's so much that I still want to do.
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The words we use have weight. Whether it's in a conversation with a friend or something said publicly on stage or broadcast. And as performers, we know that because that's why we choose the words we use - that's the whole point of comedy.
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One way in which 'Friends' did resemble 'Seinfeld' is that it really found its audience over the summer of 1995 in reruns. That's when the main title song, 'I'll Be There for You', by the Rembrandts, exploded, too.
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Both my grandmothers had upright pianos, and I just knew how to play since I was a child. Nobody taught me. I sounded like a grown-up, and then I learned how to read music. I played so well by ear I could fool the teacher to believe I could play the notes. She'd make the mistake of playing the song once, and I could play it.
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What you hear about the band is always going to be more disturbing than any particular song.
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I'd like to do a completely off-the-wall collaboration. I would like one of my songs to be the hook to a rap song. That would be so much fun!
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The main difference between the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution was that the former was mostly the work of Communist party members and others who wanted to bring about 'socialism with a human face.'
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I love old books. They tell you stories about their use. You can see where the fingerprints touched the pages as they held the book open. You can see how long they lingered on each page by the finger stains.
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I decided I would go to NYU so I could get into the comedy world and have legit housing, and my parents would not have trusted investing in a straight-up comedy career.
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Most of the time I'm thinking, I'm glad that scene was improvised.
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I'm very glad Christ tells us to love our neighbor and not to like our neighbor because it's hard to like someone threatening your children and throwing fire bombs through your window, but He asks us to love them and that I can do.
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We are now preparing for the reform of the yuan's exchange rate system. For such reforms to take place, we need good economic conditions... and we need to do it under tight control.
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A man will do astonishing things for a woman he is ardent about.
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'Frozen' definitely isn't about a man, but about the relationship between two sisters. At different times in our lives we find ourselves either more connected to or disconnected from the people in our family, and I think audiences will really be able to relate to that.
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Occasionally I write a small piece or the odd lecture in English, and I teach in English, but my fiction is always written in German.
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After the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution, songs became part of the story, as opposed to just entertainments in between comedy scenes.
