Top 150 Stephen Sondheim Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The truth is that I don’t like rehearsals. I get embarrassed hearing my own work. I assume that the cast is embarrassed to sing the stuff.”

— Stephen Sondheim

102. “I don’t write songs apart from theatrical pieces. I’m not interested in writing songs qua songs.”

— Stephen Sondheim

103. “It’s age. It’s a diminution of energy and the worry that there are no new ideas. It’s an increasing lack of confidence. I’m not the only one. I’ve checked with other people.”

— Stephen Sondheim

104. “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

105. “In not-for-profit theater, you don’t worry so much about how the audience is going to react. You want to make them absorb the piece.”

— Stephen Sondheim

106. “I took piano lessons when I was 6. I didn’t want to go on with it. I don’t remember being moved by a piece of music.”

— Stephen Sondheim

107. “Writing is a form of mischief.”

— Stephen Sondheim

108. “By the time I get through writing a score, I know the book better than the book writer does, because I’ve examined every word, and questioned the book writer on every word.”

— Stephen Sondheim

109. “I get some flak for and some resistance from colleagues for because I’m interested in storytelling. I mean what I like about songwriting is songs used to tell a story.”

— Stephen Sondheim

110. “Math was my big interest when I was in prep school. I was considering taking math in college, and majoring in it.”

— Stephen Sondheim

111. “I’m interested in the theater because I’m interested in communication with audiences. Otherwise I would be in concert music.”

— Stephen Sondheim

112. “For me it’s more fun to find an unexpected moment for a character to sing when you don’t expect them to.”

— Stephen Sondheim

113. “Everyone would like to be on Broadway, cause if a show works, you make a great deal of money and it allows you to write other shows.”

— Stephen Sondheim

114. “Generally, the best recording is the original cast, because that’s the way the piece grew: integrally, with them.”

— Stephen Sondheim

115. “There’s something inimical about the camera and song.”

— Stephen Sondheim

116. “I was never much of a reader. I’m a slow reader, which is unusual, because I’m so into language and I love words so much. But it’s hard for me to read.”

— Stephen Sondheim

117. “Every writer I’ve ever spoken to feels fraudulent in some way or other.”

— Stephen Sondheim

118. “With videotaping, on the second generation you’re already losing some of the freshness.”

— Stephen Sondheim

119. “Swing your razor wide! Sweeney, hold it to the skies!”

— Stephen Sondheim

120. “By the time I was 22, I was a professional. A young and flawed professional, but not an amateur.”

— Stephen Sondheim

121. “You get used to the exact amount of space between lines. You write a word and then you write an alternate word over it. You want enough room so you can read it, so the lines can’t be too close.”

— Stephen Sondheim

122. “When you trance out properly, when you’re completely in that world, there is no other world, so there’s no conflict.”

— Stephen Sondheim

123. “It’s pleasanter to work in the country, where you can wander out among the trees. But I don’t get as much work done. In the city you don’t want to leave the room because there’s all that chaos going on.”

— Stephen Sondheim

124. “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

125. “I liked my father a lot, but I didn’t see him very often because my mother was bitter about him. He remarried, and I used to have to sneak off to see him.”

— Stephen Sondheim

126. “Deciding what is to be sung and what is not to be sung is really what writing a musical is about.”

— Stephen Sondheim

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “You taught me about concentration. At first I thought that meant just being still, but I was to understand it meant much more. You meant to tell me to be where I was, not some place in the past or future. I worried too much about tomorrow.”

— Stephen Sondheim

131. “They wanted me to be a concert pianist, because I had a very good right hand, but my left hand’s terrible and I hated performing.”

— Stephen Sondheim

132. “My cage has many rooms.”

— Stephen Sondheim

133. “I really don’t want to write a score until the whole show is cast and staged.”

— Stephen Sondheim

134. “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

135. “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

136. “I fell into lyric writing because of music. I backed into it.”

— Stephen Sondheim

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

— Stephen Sondheim

138. “It takes almost as much imagination to justify what you write as it does to write it.”

— Stephen Sondheim

139. “Over a period of time it’s been driven home to me that I’m not going to be the most popular writer in the world, so I’m always happy when anything in any way is accepted.”

— Stephen Sondheim

140. “In the Rodgers and Hammerstein generation, popular hits came out of shows and movies.”

— Stephen Sondheim

141. “I like songs that are part of a dramatic texture, and therefore I like the scenes to be active. I wanna follow the story and that means you lean on the actors.”

— Stephen Sondheim

142. “Gotta watch out for directors.”

— Stephen Sondheim

143. “Almost all the shows I’ve been connected with have been extremely well cast. They’re playing the show, not just doing the songs.”

— Stephen Sondheim

144. “I’m sure many writers have these strange, tiny little habits.”

— Stephen Sondheim

145. “When I was growing up, there was no such thing as Off-Broadway. You either got your show on or you didn’t.”

— Stephen Sondheim

146. “If I got involved with the chat rooms and Facebook and everything – I would probably never leave. That’s why I don’t do it. I literally don’t do it. At all.”

— Stephen Sondheim

147. “You have to be submitted for the Pulitzer, and unbeknownst to us, a choral director whom I know had submitted us.”

— Stephen Sondheim

148. “I started listening to classical music when I was in my early teens. Prior to that, I listened to pop records or band records.”

— Stephen Sondheim

149. “Sometimes colleagues in performance are absolutely astonishing.”

— Stephen Sondheim

150. “For anyone approaching any one of the cast albums, if they don’t like what they hear, it’s not the performer’s fault.”

— Stephen Sondheim