Stephen Sondheim Quotes

I don't know if I change my act from century to century. Sometimes I'm onstage doing imitations and references to people who have been dead for 50 years.

'Upstream Color' in particular, it's got to infect culture at some level in order to have a life of its own. Then it'll be judged, and it'll either live or it won't by its own merit, and history will decide whether it's relevant however long into the future. I think that's more than enough to hope for.

At one time, MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated.

The very paradigm of revolution, of right versus wrong, good versus bad, is a relic with no bearing on the present. Yet artists, exhibitions, and curators valorize the sixties. People who wrote about these artists 30 years ago still write about them in the same ways, often for the same magazines.

Lennon was right. And we are bigger than Jesus. We will be as big as the Beatles, if not bigger.

No art that is not in the end understood by the People can live or ever did live a single generation.

It's a shame because we experienced probably the greatest thing - in art, in pop - we'll ever do. And it would be good to sit around and talk about it.

It's fun to be a part of pop history. Anytime you can be referenced in that respect it can be cool.

What's great is that I keep hearing from people who are discovering 'Friday Night Lights' because of streaming and Netflix and Hulu and all of these things. Somehow... things don't get old as fast as they used to. They stay vibrant.

'The Piano' ended up on television. Everything ends up there anyway.

In my 30s, it wasn't cool to like Pauly Shore movies. It was cool to like them when they came out, then it wasn't cool.

We take from the art of the past what we need. The variable posthumous reputations of even the greatest artists and the unpredictable revivals of interest in even the most obscure ones tend to reveal more about those who make revisionist assessments than about those who are being reassessed.

Every artist will one day face the moment when he or she is doing what he or she does after the style has passed and the art-world heat-seeking machine has moved on.

Even when they don't know who Nixon was, these shows will continue to play.

There's an undeniable thrill in seeing what's most current in our lives offered back to us in fictional guise, but it soon dates and it's never enough.

The entertainment medium of film is particularly tuned to the present imaginations of people at large. A lot of fiction is intensely nostalgic.

The great thing about 'Hamilton,' for me, is so many people have been exposed to and are more open to hip-hop and certain artists, despite the stigma that had before been attached to it.

The 60s will be remembered for The Beatles, Andy Warhol and Me!

Some artists leave remarkable things which, a 100 years later, don't work at all. I have left my mark; my work is hung in museums, but maybe one day the Tate Gallery or the other museums will banish me to the cellar... you never know.

I would never go back to doing the show again. I mean, every day I think about Lifestyles because somebody comes up to me and tells me how much they love the show and I should bring it back, but this is not the time to bring it back. I don't think it would be as successful today as it once was.

Popular culture is inescapable in the U.S. Why not use it?

Beethoven can't really be great because his picture isn't on a bubble gum card.

It's wonderful to look back and think you were part of a force that shaped modern music and influenced the public in so many ways. However, that's all in the past.

The regret on our side is, they used to say years ago, we are reading about you in science class. Now they say, we are reading about you in history class.

I'm still digesting the '90s. It takes some time to get perspective.