Stephen Sondheim Quotes

My songs are more arrangements than they are songs.

I feel like I'm a secondary artist, a kind of a conduit for the writer, and if it's a good writer, then I have a great road map.

There's always ideas buzzing around, but it's whether they actually end up materialising into a song.

I usually have an idea of how I want a song to sound, but I don't always know how to get there.

It don't matter who I'm working with. I just feel like I want to make the best record possible.

I wish I could play music. I think I get as closeas possible with the editing of the films. Over the years musichas been an even more important influence than-or as important as-film.There's no doubt about it. Painting, movement, dance, sculpture-it'sall in cinema.

It's really been enlightening for me to work with composers because I used to think that everything in the music was exactly what the composer meant. Well, it's what the composer meant in that moment when they wrote it.

We put our music together, piece by piece, like a jigsaw puzzle.

Because I write the music, I write the lyrics, I write the vocal melody lines - I write everything. Just because I let somebody sing something doesn't mean they're more important than the bass player or the keyboard player or the drummer.

It doesn't really matter what chords I play, what words I say or time of day it is, as it's only a Northern Song.

I always felt like I could combine good pop songs that are easy for people to like with a real person and a real mind and integrity.

The reality for me is simple. When music is written, it is usually categorized as classical. When it is improvised, it can still be called classical if it is an inspired improvisation. In either category, it is still music, and it can be good or bad or simply mediocre.

When you've written a song, sometimes it's really hard to wrap your brain around what somebody else is doing, or maybe the way that they see the song.

A lot of my songs, they're like puzzle pieces, and there's just one way to put them together. You could, if you needed to, get the scissors out and cut up things to make them work. But I don't want to do that.

I've never written one note or word of music simply because I think it will make money.

A composer is not only an architect but also an inventor, and he should not build houses in which he cannot live.

I think that that spirit, or at least the raucousness of maybe that, is in there. And then yeah, like, along the way, you fine tune it 'cause you're thinking, like, OK, we need to now turn this into a song.

In literary art, as in the art of the architect, the painter, the musician, signs that the artist is thinking of his own achievement more than of his subject always offend me.

The modern composer builds his works on the basis of truth.

I've done a bunch of collaborations where it goes well and you finish it, but then you're kind of like, "I just don't like it." And it sits there. It can be awkward, but a real musician understands that you're not always going to make what you want it to be. You can't just polish everything into perfection.

I think that any songwriter - and I think that Bob Dylan knows this more than all of us - you don't write the songs anyhow.

To a musician or songwriter, your canvas is silence.

It takes us a long time to write a song that we all really like, so it makes sense that it would take a while for the listener to get there, too.

When it comes to me, I just write the most beautiful music I can, I do the best work I can, and then I hand it out there.

I think the most important thing about what musicians do is the music. You can be as big an arsehole as you want but if you're not making good music, you won't get away with it.