Stephen Sondheim Quotes

“First take a play that you like and musicalize it. Then take a play that you like but you feel has flaws and try to improve them, and musicalize it,” Sondheim recalled him saying. “Then he said, ‘Take something that is not a play but that somebody else has written, a novel or a short story, so that you don’t have to invent the characters or plot, and musicalize that, make it into a play. Dramatize it. And then finally write an original, your own story, and dramatize that.”
― Meryle Secrest, Stephen Sondheim: A Life

“the disappearance of an audience that had supported experimentation and made such works financial, as well as critical, successes. The decline of liberal-arts teaching in schools and colleges meant that the new audience was less cultured and intellectually oriented; wedded to television and movies, it wanted to be entertained rather than challenged.”
― Meryle Secrest, Stephen Sondheim: A Life

“To have one’s helplessness and … dependency taken advantage of by the person one loves … soon produces an interlinking of love and hate. Because anger toward the loved person cannot be expressed for fear of losing that person … Ambivalence, the interlinking of love and hate, remains an important characteristic of later object relationships. Many”
― Meryle Secrest, Stephen Sondheim: A Life

“The real point was that it was exactly like the film Love Affair,” said Sondheim, whose frames of reference were often cinematic. “They decided they would not do anything but see in six months whether they still wanted each other. So they let six months go by and then decided that they did want to see each other, so she left her husband—even though she was a Catholic—and he left my mother.”
― Meryle Secrest, Stephen Sondheim: A Life

“Herbert Sondheim had written a note, packed up his clothes, and walked out.”
― Meryle Secrest, Stephen Sondheim: A Life