Stephen Sondheim

Tonight, tonight, won't be just any night. Tonight there will be no morning star.

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

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

Let Pirelli's / Miracle Elixir / Activate your roots, sir... Keep it off your boots, sir- / Eats right through. Yes, get Pirelli's! / Use a bottle of it! / Ladies seem to love it... Flies do, too!

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

Careful the spell you cast, not just on children. Sometimes the spell may last Past what you can see And turn against you... Careful the tale you tell. That is the spell.

Swing your razor wide! Sweeney, hold it to the skies!

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.

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

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.

Musicals are — particularly musicals — plays also, but musicals particularly are… the last collaborator is your audience, and so you’ve got to wait ’til the last collaborator comes in before you can complete the collaboration.

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

You have two kinds of shows on Broadway - revivals and the same kind of musicals over and over again, all spectacles. You get your tickets for 'The Lion King' a year in advance, and essentially a family comes as if to a picnic, and they pass on to their children the idea that that's what the theater is - a spectacular musical you see once a year, a stage version of a movie. It has nothing to do with theater at all. It has to do with seeing what is familiar. We live in a recycled culture.

Work is what you do for others, liebchen. Art is what you do for yourself.

I don't find my life that interesting. The shows, maybe. But not me.

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

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

You may know what you need, but to get what you want, better see that you keep what you have.

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.

White. A blank page or canvas. So many possibilities.

Music is structure out of Chaos