Glenn Gould Quotes

23 quotes in 374 categories

• Theirs [the Beatles] is a happy, cocky, belligerently resourceless brand of harmonic primitivism... In the Liverpudlian repertoire, the indulged amateurishness of the musical material, though…
• Mozart died too late rather than too soon.
• The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but rather the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder…
• My moods are inversely related to the clarity of the sky.
• If an artist wants to use his mind for creative work, cutting oneself off from society is a necessary thing
• I detest audiences - not in their individual components, but en masse I detest audiences. I think they're a force of evil. It seems to…
• I don't approve of people who watch television, but I am one of them.
• The purpose of art is the lifelong construction of a state of wonder.
• Isolation is the indispensable component of human happiness.
• One does not play the piano with one's fingers, one plays the piano with one's mind.
• Once I turned pro, so to speak, I put away childish things forever.
• The nature of the contrapuntal experience is that every note has to have a past and a future on the horizontal plane.
• A record is a concert without halls and a museum whose curator is the owner.
• I believe that the only excuse we have for being musicians and for making music in any fashion, is to make it differently, to perform…
• There is a craft and a power in listening.
• I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the…
• The justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men, and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations.
• The trouble begins when we start to be so impressed by the strategies of our systematized thought that we forget that it does relate to…
• The mental imagery involved with pianistic tactilia is not related to the striking of individual keys but rather to the rites of passage between notes.
• I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the…

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