Quotes from Stephen Sondheim

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

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.

If you force yourself to write away from the piano, you come up with more inventive things. If you're too good a piano player, as some composers are, the music may become flavorless and glib. And if you're not a very good pianist, you're limited to the same patterns.

There's something inimical about the camera and song.

I prefer neurotic people. I like to hear rumblings beneath the surface.

Everyone would like to be on Broadway, cause if a show works, you make a great deal of money and it allows you to write other shows.

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.

I liked my father a lot, but I didn't see him very often because my mother was bitter about him. He remarried, and I used to have to sneak off to see him.

I chose and my world was shaken. So what? The choice may have been mistaken; the choosing was not. You have to move on.

If I cannot fly, let me sing.

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.

I'm interested in the theater because I'm interested in communication with audiences. Otherwise I would be in concert music.

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

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.

Music straightjackets a poem and prevents it from breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric. Poetry doesn't need music; lyrics do.

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.

They wanted me to be a concert pianist, because I had a very good right hand, but my left hand's terrible and I hated performing.

I do not hope for what I cannot have! I do not cling to things I cannot keep!

Stay a child while you can be a child.

Gotta watch out for directors.

I have inherited my father's sense of humour about myself. It's a lot more pleasant to make fun of yourself than when someone else does.

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

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.

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