top of page
.png){kind=small}
"So many good songs get written fast, because you know exactly what has to work."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Work quotes
"We try, when we wake, to lay the new day at God's feet; before we have finished shaving, it becomes our day and God's share in it is felt as a tribute which we must pay out of 'our own' pocket, a deduction from the time which ought, we feel, to be 'our own'. A man starts a new job with a sense of vocation and, perhaps, for the first week still keeps the discharge of the vocation as his end, taking the pleasures and pains from God's hand, as they came, as 'accidents'. But in the second week he is beginning to 'know the ropes': by the third, he has quarried out of the total job his own plan for himself within that job, and when he can pursue this he feels that he is getting no more than his rights, and when he cannot, that he is being interfered."
"The Lord had given them the day and the Lord had given them the strength. And the day and the strength had been dedicated to labor, and the labor was its reward. Who was the labor for? What would be its fruits? These were irrelevant and idle questions."
"If I went to work in a factory the first thing I'd do is join a union."
"Employment stereotypes you."
"The work I did in Vertigo meant nothing if no one cared about the movie. Luckily, Vertigo had a revival and people had begun to recognize there was something special and it gained in reputation. But it just as well could have ended up rotting in film cans somewhere."
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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
bottom of page