The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you'll do yourself a service.

Stephen Sondheim

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Stephen Sondheim

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Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Stephen Sondheim

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

Stephen Sondheim

The nice thing about doing a crossword puzzle is, you know there is a solution.

Stephen Sondheim

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.

Stephen Sondheim

Generally, the best recording is the original cast, because that's the way the piece grew: integrally, with them.

Stephen Sondheim

Every writer I've ever spoken to feels fraudulent in some way or other.

Stephen Sondheim

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

Stephen Sondheim

I was raised to be charming, not sincere.

Stephen Sondheim

I would have been a geologist.

Stephen Sondheim

The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you'll do yourself a service.

Stephen Sondheim

So many good songs get written fast, because you know exactly what has to work.

Stephen Sondheim

Gotta watch out for directors.

Stephen Sondheim

The dumbing down of the country reflects itself on Broadway. The shows get dumber, and the public gets used to them.

Stephen Sondheim

A close-up on screen can say all a song can.

Stephen Sondheim

My mother wanted me off her hands. She was a working woman. She designed clothes, and she was a celebrity collector. It's my mother's ambition to be a celebrity.

Stephen Sondheim

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.

Stephen Sondheim

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

Stephen Sondheim

When you know your cast well and their strengths and weaknesses, you can start writing for them, just the way Shakespeare wrote for his actors.

Stephen Sondheim

One of the hardest things about writing lyrics is to make the lyrics sit on the music in such a way that you're not aware there was a writer there.

Stephen Sondheim

After the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution, songs became part of the story, as opposed to just entertainments in between comedy scenes.

Stephen Sondheim

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

Stephen Sondheim

By the time I was 22, I was a professional. A young and flawed professional, but not an amateur.

Stephen Sondheim

There's something inimical about the camera and song.

Stephen Sondheim

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

Stephen Sondheim

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.

Stephen Sondheim

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.

Stephen Sondheim

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.

Stephen Sondheim

Nowadays, there are sometimes more producers than there are people in the cast, because it takes that much money to put a show on.

Stephen Sondheim

When the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you've written.

Stephen Sondheim

I really don't want to write a score until the whole show is cast and staged.

Stephen Sondheim

If people have split views about your work, I think it's flattering. I'd rather have them feel something about it than dismiss it.

Stephen Sondheim

You can't have personal investors anymore because it's too expensive, so you have to have corporate investment or a lot of rich people.

Stephen Sondheim

I fell into lyric writing because of music. I backed into it.

Stephen Sondheim

Everyone I used to play with has either given up or is dead.

Stephen Sondheim

I played the organ when I went to military school, when I was 10. They had a huge organ, the second-largest pipe organ in New York State. I loved all the buttons and the gadgets. I've always been a gadget man.

Stephen Sondheim

Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.

Stephen Sondheim

Nice is different than good.

Stephen Sondheim

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.

Stephen Sondheim

The movie adaptations of stage musicals that I've seen, without exception, in my opinion don't work. A lot of people would disagree with me.

Stephen Sondheim

When I was growing up, there was no such thing as Off-Broadway. You either got your show on or you didn't.

Stephen Sondheim

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.

Stephen Sondheim

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

Stephen Sondheim

My personal life and my artistic life do not interfere with each other.

Stephen Sondheim

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.

Stephen Sondheim

I certainly wanted my name in lights. I wanted my name on a marquee. I wanted recognition on Broadway.

Stephen Sondheim

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.

Stephen Sondheim

I'm always conscious of what I'm writing, conscious of what the actor may ask me. I have a defense for nearly every line in the song.

Stephen Sondheim