Top 150 Stephen Sondheim Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “Music is structure out of Chaos.”

— Stephen Sondheim

53. “Only capitalists get photographers.”

— Stephen Sondheim

54. “When the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you’ve written.”

— Stephen Sondheim

55. “Musical comedies aren’t written, they are rewritten.”

— Stephen Sondheim

56. “Somebody, crowd me with love. Somebody, force me to care. Somebody, make me come through, I’ll always be there, as frightened as you, to help us survive being alive!”

— Stephen Sondheim

57. “I like murder mysteries, the Agatha Christie kinds of things where you know that it’s all going to be neatly wound up at the end.”

— Stephen Sondheim

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

— Stephen Sondheim

59. “Stop worrying where you’re going. Move on. If you can know where you’re going, you’ve gone. Just keep moving on.”

— Stephen Sondheim

60. “Slotted spoons don’t hold much soup...”

— Stephen Sondheim

61. “My parents got divorced and military school gave me a structure. A lot of kids my age were children of divorced parents. They didn’t know what to do with the kids.”

— Stephen Sondheim

62. “No one has ever known me as clearly as you. No one has ever shown me that love allows everything. Not pretty or safe or easy but something I never knew. Love within reason, that isn’t love and I learned that from you.”

— Stephen Sondheim

63. “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

64. “I was watching him crawl, Back over the wall-! Then bang! Crash! And the lightning flash! And- well, that’s another story, Never mind- Anyway...”

— Stephen Sondheim

65. “Perpetual anticipation is good for the soul but it’s bad for the heart.”

— Stephen Sondheim

66. “It’s not so hard to be married, I’ve done it three or four times.”

— Stephen Sondheim

67. “I like neurotic people. I like troubled people. Not that I don’t like squared-away people, but I prefer neurotic people. I like to hear rumblings beneath the surface.”

— Stephen Sondheim

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

— Stephen Sondheim

69. “The more you cling to things, The more you love them, The more the pain you suffer, When they’re taken from you...”

— Stephen Sondheim

70. “Children can only grow from something you love to something you lose.”

— Stephen Sondheim

71. “Everyone tells tiny lies, what’s important really is the size.”

— Stephen Sondheim

72. “If you told me to write a love song tonight, I’d have a lot of trouble. But if you tell me to write a love song about a girl with a red dress who goes into a bar and is on her fifth martini and is falling off her chair, that’s a lot easier, and it makes me free to say anything I want.”

— Stephen Sondheim

73. “I’m before him on my knees, and he kisses me He assumes I lose my reason and I do. Men are stupid, men are vain, Love’s disgusting, love’s insane, A humiliating business-oh how true.”

— Stephen Sondheim

74. “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

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

— Stephen Sondheim

76. “You move just a finger, say the slightest word, something’s bound to linger-be heard.”

— Stephen Sondheim

77. “They hear drums, we hear music.”

— Stephen Sondheim

78. “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

79. “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

80. “I was raised to be charming, not sincere.”

— Stephen Sondheim

81. “I do not dwell on dreams I know how soon a dream becomes an expectation How can I have expectations? Look at me, No, Captain, Look at me, Look at me!”

— Stephen Sondheim

82. “Friendship, obligation and greed are not good enough reasons to write anything.”

— Stephen Sondheim

83. “I didn’t really want to write just lyrics, but I wanted to meet Leonard Bernstein. Music was always the first reason I was writing songs.”

— Stephen Sondheim

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

— Stephen Sondheim

85. “The Tonys ignored West Side Story. The Tonys ignored Gypsy. It’s a kind of public humiliation.”

— Stephen Sondheim

86. “I love computers. I love writing on them. I love gadgetry. The thing is: I am a slow reader. So, if I am going to get my work done, I read, like, a newspaper and that’s it. If I got into websites and the internet, I wouldn’t get any work done.”

— Stephen Sondheim

87. “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

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

— Stephen Sondheim

89. “I’ve always liked puzzles, since I was a kid. I like party games, silly games. I loved chess. I enjoy jigsaw puzzles, but I’m not particularly visual.”

— Stephen Sondheim

90. “Hit songs did not come out of musicals. Pop-rock was creating the hits. There were very few songs that made the charts out of any Broadway musical.”

— Stephen Sondheim

91. “Sometimes I’ll ask the book writer to write a monologue, not to be performed, just as if they were notes for the character.”

— Stephen Sondheim

92. “Take a play that you like but you think is flawed, and see if you can improve it and turn it into a musical. Then make up your own story.”

— Stephen Sondheim

93. “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

94. “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

95. “Musicals are so expensive to put on the stage that you have to have the backing of a corporate, you have to have Universal Studios or Disney or somebody to put in the money.”

— Stephen Sondheim

96. “Lemuel Ayers had had a huge success producing and designing Kiss Me, Kate. He wanted to produce this as a musical. I got the job. It was a professional score.”

— Stephen Sondheim

97. “What justifies a character singing one idea for 3 minutes on the screen? I get impatient and want the story to carry on. I don’t get impatient in the theatre.”

— Stephen Sondheim

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

— Stephen Sondheim

99. “When I listen to my work, I think, what’s so inflammatory about it? It’s not really that dissonant. A lot of people who used to hate my stuff have come round to it.”

— Stephen Sondheim

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

— Stephen Sondheim