Claude Debussy

Music is the silence between the notes.

— Claude Debussy

On those who overanalyze his music: When you tear the wings off a butterfly, it is no longer a butterfly

— Claude Debussy

Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.

— Claude Debussy

There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. I love music passionately. And because l love it,…

— Claude Debussy

People come to music to seek oblivion: is that not also a form of deception?

— Claude Debussy

The music I desire must be supple enough to adapt itself to the lyrical effusions of the soul and the fantasy of…

— Claude Debussy

Life is the space between our things.

— Claude Debussy

The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.

— Claude Debussy

I have a horror of sentimentality, and I cannot forget that its name is Saint-Saëns.

— Claude Debussy

Collect impressions. Don't be in a hurry to write them down. Because that's something music can do better than painting: it can…

— Claude Debussy

First of all, ladies and gentlemen, you must forget that you are singers.

— Claude Debussy

Inspiration and ideas only come to me when I have not had a woman in a very long time... Ballads, polonaises, even…

— Claude Debussy

I wish to sing of my interior visions with the naive candour of a child.

— Claude Debussy

Works of art make rules but rules do not make works of art.

— Claude Debussy

Art is the most beautiful deception of all. And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we…

— Claude Debussy

There is no theory. You merely have to listen. Pleasure is the law.

— Claude Debussy

What I am trying to do is something different - an effect of reality, but what some fools call Impressionism, a term…

— Claude Debussy

To complete a work is just like being present at the death of someone you love.

— Claude Debussy

It is necessary to abandon yourself completely, and let the music do as it will with you. All people come to music…

— Claude Debussy

Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes.

— Claude Debussy

If I am not making music, I have no reason for existing.

— Claude Debussy

Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear.

— Claude Debussy

Claude Debussy was a rare phenomenon a composer profoundly and subversively revolutionary.

— Claude Debussy

The century of aeroplanes deserves its own music. As there are no precedents, I must create anew.

— Claude Debussy

He was the incomparable painter of mystery, silence, and the infinite, of the passing cloud, and the sunlit shimmer of the waves-subleties…

— Claude Debussy