Top 69 Quotes by 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.

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.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

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.

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.

When I'm writing a song, I try to be the character.

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.

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.

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

Two of the hardest words in the language to rhyme are life and love. Of all words!