Stephen Sondheim Quotes
Success is like failure, It's how you perceive it, It's what you do with it, not how you achieve it.
Any moment, big or small, Is a moment, after all. Seize the moment, skies may fall Any moment.
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.
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.
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.
I'm interested in the theater because I'm interested in communication with audiences. Otherwise I would be in concert music.
The situation's fraught, Fraughter than I thought, With horrible, impossible possibilities!
The more you cling to things, The more you love them, The more the pain you suffer, When they're taken from you.
I like neurotic people. I like troubled people. Not that I don't like squared-away people, but I prefer neurotic people. I like to hear rumblings beneath the surface.
You may know what you need, but to get what you want, better see that you keep what you have.
The dumbing down of the country reflects itself on Broadway. The shows get dumber, and the public gets used to them.
When you trance out properly, when you're completely in that world, there is no other world, so there's no conflict.
After the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution, songs became part of the story, as opposed to just entertainments in between comedy scenes.
I chose and my world was shaken. So what? The choice may have been mistaken; the choosing was not. You have to move on.
Just remember, Someone is on your side (our side) Someone else is not While we're seeing our side Maybe we forgot: they are not alone. No one is alone.
If I got involved with the chat rooms and Facebook and everything - I would probably never leave. That's why I don't do it. I literally don't do it. At all.
Music straightjackets a poem and prevents it from breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric. Poetry doesn't need music; lyrics do.
Math and music are intimately related. Not necessarily on a conscious level, but sure.
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.
Into the woods you go again You have to every now and then Into the woods, no telling when Be ready for the journey Into the woods, each time you go There's more to learn of what you know.
Pointillism takes emotional images, character, etc., and makes them all come together and make a whole that tells a story.
Deciding what is to be sung and what is not to be sung is really what writing a musical is about.
I've always preferred actors who sing to singers who act in all the shows I've done.
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.
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.
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.
