Stephen Sondheim Quotes
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Gotta watch out for directors.
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The man i'll never be, Who remembers him?
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The nice thing about doing a crossword puzzle is, you know there is a solution.
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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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Hit songs did not come out of musicals. Pop-rock was creating the hits. There were very few songs that made the charts out of any Broadway musical.
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What justifies a character singing one idea for 3 minutes on the screen? I get impatient and want the story to carry on. I don't get impatient in the theatre.
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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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Generally, the best recording is the original cast, because that's the way the piece grew: integrally, with them.
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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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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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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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Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.
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Work is what you do for others, liebchen. Art is what you do for yourself.
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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 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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Best to take the moment present as a present for the moment. . .
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Music is structure out of Chaos
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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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Friendship, obligation and greed are not good enough reasons to write anything.
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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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Almost all the shows I've been connected with have been extremely well cast. They're playing the show, not just doing the songs.
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Tonight, tonight, won't be just any night. Tonight there will be no morning star.
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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.