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"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."
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Exlpore more Work quotes
"Have convictions. Be friendly. Stick to your beliefs as they stick to theirs. Work as hard as they do."
"A good work ethic is not so much a concern for hard work but rather one for responsibility. There have been a great many men and women who have in fact used work or hustle or selfish ambition as an escape from real responsibility, an escape from purpose. In matters such as these, the hard worker is just as dysfunctional as the sloth."
"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 the food that one ate the night before were somehow able to be seen and identified through one's clothes throughout the day, millions of employees would each fast ten or so days before their payday."
"Employees leave where they work. Employers live where they work."
Explore more quotes by Stephen Sondheim
"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."
"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."
"Oscar Hammerstein was a surrogate father during all those many days, and weeks and months when I didn't see my own father."
"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."
"By the time I was 22, I was a professional. A young and flawed professional, but not an amateur."
"The fact is popular art dates. It grows quaint. How many people feel strongly about Gilbert and Sullivan today compared to those who felt strongly in 1890?"
"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."
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