Stephen Sondheim

I was raised to be charming, not sincere.

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.

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

The fate of nations is intimately bound up with their powers of reproduction. All nations and all empires first felt decadence gnawing at them when their birth rate fell off.

There's never been anything I didn't love that I didn't connect with on a personal level because, to some degree, I projected upon it.

The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.