Stephen Sondheim Quotes

Technology must remain a tool. It's a great tool, but technology is the pen to write the book. It's not the book. If you have a great pen, maybe you'll write faster or it will look better, but at the end, you have something to say, or you don't.

The thing is, with writing, it's form or content. You need to write about something interesting or you need to write about it in an interesting way.

I write in words. I don't write in sounds or in shapes or in flavors.

That isn't writing at all, it's typing.

Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words.

A man who writes well writes not as others write, but as he himself writes; it is often in speaking badly that he speaks well.

If you want to write you should learn the alphabet. You write and write and in the end you hava a beautiful, perfect alphabet. But it isn’t the alphabed that is important. The important thing is what you are writing, what you are expressing. The same thing goes for photography. Photographs can be technically perfect and even beautiful, but they have no expression.

Style is just an impression. Style itself is hollow. Style, its ok style as long as it is part of a language. Style for style itself is just something very hollow.

So, then, what is style? There are two chief aspects of any piece of writing: 1) what you say and 2) how you say it. The former is "content" and the latter is "style."

My use of language is part and parcel of my message.

Words are the basic tools, if you are a writer. But why? Why do you choose one set of tools rather than another?

The word processor is a better tool than a quill pen because you can do so much more with it, but on the other hand, what you have to say and how you say it is the ultimate determination.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

I use music as a medium to talk to people.

Whatever I'm thinking about has got to fit into thirty-two pages, the standard picture book size. So that's something. But the structure and the form for me are almost the most important, because these will express as much as words and images will the content of the work.

Through writing, one experiences something different to what one experiences with the five senses one has because language is a different metier.

Technology remains a tool: you can have the best tool in the world, but if you have nothing to say, it will remain an empty experience.

Style matters, but the real force of writing is ideas, not style.

Writing can be fun. I think the challenge is to convey interesting things in accessible ways, and that's what I aim to do in books.

Format is just the language. Content is the only thing that is important. Form is like handwriting. Whether you write in a scribble or clean handwriting or type it, the content remains the same. You want to write in clean hand, in a kind of a clear format only because it is aesthetically pleasing. I can scribble, that's also fine.

I enjoy both TV writing and novel writing, and they are very similar. The goal is to entertain and amuse the audience, and I subscribe to this P.G. Wodehouse piece of advice: "Try to give pleasure with every sentence."

Manner is all in all, whate'er is writ,The substitute for genius, sense, and wit.

If you don't have an idea, all you have is style.

My style of writing is very diffrent from yours.

Letters couldn't care less whether what is written with them is true or false.