Mr. Sondheim

Mr. Sondheim liked to think of himself less as a songwriter than as a playwright, albeit one who wrote very short plays and set them to music. His lyrics, scrupulously literate and resonant with complex ideas or emotional ambivalence, were often impossibly clever but rarely only clever; his language was sometimes erudite but seldom purple. He was a world-class rhyming gymnast, not just at the ends of lines but within them — one of the baked dishes on the ghoulish menu in “Sweeney Todd” was “shepherd’s pie peppered with actual shepherd” — and he upheld the highest standards for acceptable wordplay, or at least tried to.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/26/theater/stephen-sondheim-dead.html

Why did he hope to keep working when he could just bask in appreciation?

“What else am I going to do?” he asked. “I’m too old now to do a lot of traveling, I’m sorry to say. What else would I do with my time but write?”

And did he write daily in his final weeks? “No, I’m a procrastinator,” he said. “I need a collaborator who pushes me, who gets impatient.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/26/theater/stephen-sondheim-final-interview.html