My mother wanted me off her hands. She was a working woman. She designed clothes, and she was a celebrity collector. It's my mother's ambition to be a celebrity.
— Stephen Sondheim
I fell into lyric writing because of music. I backed into it.
Math and music are intimately related. Not necessarily on a conscious level, but sure.
All the best performers bring to their role something more, something different than what the author put on paper. That's what makes theatre live. That's why it persists.
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.
After the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution, songs became part of the story, as opposed to just entertainments in between comedy scenes.
I prefer neurotic people. I like to hear rumblings beneath the surface.
Oscar Hammerstein was a surrogate father during all those many days, and weeks and months when I didn't see my own father.
The nice thing about doing a crossword puzzle is, you know there is a solution.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone I used to play with has either given up or is dead.
I would have been a geologist.
Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.
Generally, the best recording is the original cast, because that's the way the piece grew: integrally, with them.
A close-up on screen can say all a song can.
There's something inimical about the camera and song.
One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music.
