Stephen Sondheim Quotes
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Generally, the best recording is the original cast, because that's the way the piece grew: integrally, with them.
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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.
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You get used to the exact amount of space between lines. You write a word and then you write an alternate word over it. You want enough room so you can read it, so the lines can't be too close.
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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.
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Nowadays, there are sometimes more producers than there are people in the cast, because it takes that much money to put a show on.
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Making lyrics feel natural, sit on music in such a way that you dont 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 youre making art.
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Two of the hardest words in the language to rhyme are life and love. Of all words!
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The Tonys ignored West Side Story. The Tonys ignored Gypsy. It's a kind of public humiliation.
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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.
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Work is what you do for others, liebchen. Art is what you do for yourself.
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Gotta watch out for directors.
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The truth is that I don't like rehearsals. I get embarrassed hearing my own work. I assume that the cast is embarrassed to sing the stuff.
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Music straightjackets a poem and prevents it from breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric. Poetry doesn't need music; lyrics do.
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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.
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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.
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The man i'll never be, Who remembers him?
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Friendship, obligation and greed are not good enough reasons to write anything.
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Music is structure out of Chaos
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Best to take the moment present as a present for the moment. . .
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Tonight, tonight, won't be just any night. Tonight there will be no morning star.
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The only reason to write is from love.
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There's a hole in the world Like a great black pit And the vermin of the world Inhabit it ... And it goes by the name of London.
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I read to see myself in other people's lives.
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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.