Famous quotes by Composers

"In order to create, there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?"

Igor Stravinsky, Composer

"I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve, and I serve it in all lucidity"

Igor Stravinsky, Composer

"I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it"

Igor Stravinsky, Composer

"Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading"

Igor Stravinsky, Composer

"Conductors' careers are made for the most part with 'Romantic' music. 'Classic' music eliminates the conductor; we do not remember him in it"

Igor Stravinsky, Composer

"When I was growing up, there was no such thing as Off-Broadway. You either got your show on or you didn't"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

"There's something inimical about the camera and song"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

"My personal life and my artistic life do not interfere with each other"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

"A close-up on screen can say all a song can"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

"Musicals are plays, but the last collaborator is your audience, so you've got to wait 'til the last collaborator comes in before you can complete the collaboration"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

"I was raised to be charming, not sincere"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

"Generally, the best recording is the original cast, because that's the way the piece grew: integrally, with them"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

"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"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

"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"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

"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, Composer

"Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

"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"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

"I prefer neurotic people. I like to hear rumblings beneath the surface"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

"Every writer I've ever spoken to feels fraudulent in some way or other"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

"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"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

"When the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you've written"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

"Oscar Hammerstein was a surrogate father during all those many days, and weeks and months when I didn't see my own father"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

"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"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

"I would have been a geologist"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

"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"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

"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"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

"Everyone I used to play with has either given up or is dead"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

"By the time I was 22, I was a professional. A young and flawed professional, but not an amateur"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

"I fell into lyric writing because of music. I backed into it"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

"Gotta watch out for directors"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

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