Tonight, tonight, won't be just any night. Tonight there will be no morning star.
Stephen SondheimRead
The more restrictions you have, the easier anything is to write.
Interpretation
Restrictions can enhance creativity and simplify the writing process.
Stephen Sondheim suggests that having limitations or restrictions can actually make the writing process easier and more focused. When a writer has a clear set of boundaries, they can channel their creativity more effectively, as these constraints force them to think innovatively within a defined framework, often leading to more impactful and concise work.
In practice
This quote can be used in a workshop on creative writing to inspire participants to embrace constraints.
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.
Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.
What I do is creative. It doesn't seem like that when I'm playing a piece that was written in the past, but the score is just the outline and everything in it is relative. The key is to make this piece written by someone else belong to you and then connect to the audience.
Every normal human being (and not merely the 'artist') has an inexhaustible store of buried images in his subconscious, it is merely a matter of courage or liberating procedures ... of voyages into the unconscious, to bring pure and unadulterated found objects to light.
The public needs art, and it is the responsibility of a βself-proclaimed artistβ to realize the public needs art, and not to make bourgeois art for the few and ignore the masses. β¦ I am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible with as many different individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning attached. The viewer creates the reality, the meaning, the conception of the piece. I am merely a middleman trying to bring ideas together.
I'm a rewriter. That's the part I like best . . . once I have a pile of paper to work with, it's like having the pieces of a puzzle. I just have to put the pieces together to make a picture.
I remember saying to myself those things are very, very important to hear, but there must be another way to say them so that they will truly be heard. I mean, that's what art is. Art is about being provocative. Art is also about beauty. And if you leave the latter out, the former doesn't matter.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.