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"Movies can be instruments of enlightenment."

"The goal of art was the vital expression of self."

"The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art."

"Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late."

"When whisperedwhat an exquisitesong, it makes-your name."

"A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest. If you're not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, you're not interested or even involved."

"It would have to be connected with performance art somehow, either in the front of the house or the back. I was myopic about this from fourth grade on."
Explore more quotes by Stephen Sondheim


"The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you'll do yourself a service."


"Nowadays, there are sometimes more producers than there are people in the cast, because it takes that much money to put a show on."


"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."


"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."


"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."


"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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