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I've always liked puzzles, since I was a kid. I like party games, silly games. I loved chess. I enjoy jigsaw puzzles, but I'm not particularly visual.

Stephen Sondheim

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Stephen Sondheim
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: March 22
Author
Composer
Dramaturge
Librettist
Lyricist
Musician
Poet
Screenwriter
Songwriter
New York City
New York
Stephen Joshua Sondheim
Party
Visual
Enjoy
Chess
Kids
Silly
Always
Liked
Like
Particularly
Loved
Jigsaw
Since
Puzzles
Games
Visuals

More quotes by Stephen Sondheim

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Musicals are — particularly musicals — plays also, but musicals particularly are… the last collaborator is your audience, and so you’ve got to wait ’til the last collaborator comes in before you can complete the collaboration.
Stephen Sondheim
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That's the trouble with awards for a body of work. They always come at both a good time and a wrong time. Good because they tell you what you've been doing was worth the doing and wrong because they ought to come when you're young and excited and hungry for assurance that what you're doing is worth the doing.
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Sometimes colleagues in performance are absolutely astonishing.
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I chose and my world was shaken. So what? The choice may have been mistaken the choosing was not. You have to move on.
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Sometimes I'll ask the book writer to write a monologue, not to be performed, just as if they were notes for the character.
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A song is such a short form ... that 'the slightest flaw seems like a mountain.' And so every song needs to be revised 'til it's close to perfection... But achieving perfection takes a lot of energy.
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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.
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By the time I get through writing a score, I know the book better than the book writer does, because I've examined every word, and questioned the book writer on every word.
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When you trance out properly, when you're completely in that world, there is no other world, so there's no conflict.
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No one has ever known me as clearly as you. No one has ever shown me that love allows everything. Not pretty or safe or easy but something I never knew. Love within reason, that isn't love and I learned that from you.
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Now, this one might be a little stringy, but then again, it's fiddle player. That isn't fiddle player, it's piccolo player. How can you tell? It's PIPING hot! Then blow on it first!
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I like songs that are part of a dramatic texture, and therefore I like the scenes to be active. I wanna follow the story and that means you lean on the actors.
Stephen Sondheim
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Oh if life were made of moments Even now and then a bad one--! But if life were only moments, Then you'd never know you had one.
Stephen Sondheim
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I like murder mysteries, the Agatha Christie kinds of things where you know that it's all going to be neatly wound up at the end.
Stephen Sondheim
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My main goal is to tell a story.
Stephen Sondheim
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Take a play that you like but you think is flawed, and see if you can improve it and turn it into a musical. [...] Then make up your own story.
Stephen Sondheim
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You have to be submitted for the Pulitzer, and unbeknownst to us, a choral director whom I know had submitted us.
Stephen Sondheim
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Lyrics have to be underwritten. That's why poets generally make poor lyric writers because the language is too rich. You get drowned in it.
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With videotaping, on the second generation you're already losing some of the freshness.
Stephen Sondheim
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The nice thing about doing a crossword puzzle is, you know there is a solution.
Stephen Sondheim