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" Everyone I used to play with has either given up or is dead. "
Stephen Sondheim
Dead
Everyone
Up
Related Quotes:
" 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
Laugh
Love
Me
" My idea of heaven is not writing. "
Stephen Sondheim
Heaven
Idea
Writing
" I fell into lyric writing because of music. I backed into it. "
Stephen Sondheim
Fell
Music
Lyric
" On stage, generally speaking, the story is stopped or held back by songs, because that's the convention. Audiences enjoy the song and the singer, that's the point. "
Stephen Sondheim
Story
Singer
Enjoy
" I would have been a geologist. "
Stephen Sondheim
Geologist
Would
Been
" I was raised to be charming, not sincere. "
Stephen Sondheim
I Was Raised
Raised
Sincere
" By the time I was 22, I was a professional. A young and flawed professional, but not an amateur. "
Stephen Sondheim
Professional
Young
Time
" There's something inimical about the camera and song. "
Stephen Sondheim
Song
About
Camera
" Everybody faces a blank piece of paper, no matter what they've written or painted or composed before. I can't imagine approaching every single new project with-without doubt. "
Stephen Sondheim
Project
New
Matter
" Every writer I've ever spoken to feels fraudulent in some way or other. "
Stephen Sondheim
Some
Way
Feels
" I certainly wanted my name in lights. I wanted my name on a marquee. I wanted recognition on Broadway. "
Stephen Sondheim
Recognition
Broadway
Lights
" Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos. "
Stephen Sondheim
Art
Out
Order
" Every time one can write a self-deluded song, you are way ahead of the game, way ahead. Self-delusion is the basis of nearly all the great scenes in all the great plays, from 'Oedipus' to 'Hamlet.' "
Stephen Sondheim
Time
You
Ahead
" The more restrictions you have, the easier anything is to write. "
Stephen Sondheim
More
Write
Restrictions
" When I'm writing a song, I try to be the character. "
Stephen Sondheim
Character
Try
Song
" 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
Woman
Ambition
Clothes
" The dumbing down of the country reflects itself on Broadway. The shows get dumber, and the public gets used to them. "
Stephen Sondheim
Public
Broadway
Country
" When the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you've written. "
Stephen Sondheim
Audience
Temperature
You
" After the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution, songs became part of the story, as opposed to just entertainments in between comedy scenes. "
Stephen Sondheim
Story
Comedy
Just
" Making lyrics feel natural, sit on music in such a way that you don't feel the effort of the author, so that they shine and bubble and rise and fall, is very, very hard to do. Whereas you can sit at the piano and just play and feel you're making art. "
Stephen Sondheim
Art
You
Music
" 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
Sometimes
Show
People
" I was essentially trained by Oscar Hammerstein to think of songs as one-act plays, to move a song from point A to point B dramatically. "
Stephen Sondheim
Point
Move
Think
" 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
Create
Imagination
Meaning
" 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
Chance
Story
You
" 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
Listen
Just
Avoid
" 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
Because
You
Why
" I'm very opinionated about movie musicals when they're adapted from live shows. You'll sit still for a three-minute song in a theater. But in movies, a glance from someone's eyes will tell you the whole story in a few seconds. "
Stephen Sondheim
Eyes
Story
You
" 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
People
Me
Opinion
" 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
See
Own
Days
" 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
Time
Story
Speech