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

Stephen Sondheim

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

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" My idea of heaven is not writing. "

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" 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. "

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

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" 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

" Gotta watch out for directors. "

Stephen Sondheim

" Every single song I've ever written is sung by a character created by somebody else. Some might have a jaundiced view of love, some don't. But none of these songs is me singing - not a single one. "

Stephen Sondheim

" I'm interested in the theater because I'm interested in communication with audiences. Otherwise I would be in concert music. "

Stephen Sondheim

" 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

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

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 was raised to be charming, not sincere. "

Stephen Sondheim

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

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

" 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

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

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

" 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

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

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

" 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

" 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

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

Stephen Sondheim

" There's something inimical about the camera and song. "

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

" 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