1,636 quotes found
“Wagner thought Rossini unserious; Rossini thought Wagner 'lacked sun'. Wagner also became the butt of a phrase Rossini had used down the years to describe musicians about whom he had certain reserv...”
“I wanted to see everything. It was around the time I acquired language, or even before that time, when something happened that changed my relationship to the spin of the world. My concept of langua...”
“This body, this body holding me. Be my reminder here that I am not alone in this body, this body holding me. Feeling eternal. All this pain is an illusion.”
“Yet even then the music has still a quality stern and implacable, deliberate and without passion so much as immolation, pleading, asking, for not love, not life, forbidding it to others, demanding ...”
“Too bad people can't always be playing music, maybe then there wouldn't be any more wars.”
“The movies, I thought, have got the soundtrack to war all wrong. War isn't rock 'n' roll. It's got nothing to do with Jimi Hendrix or Richard Wagner. War is nursery rhymes and early Madonna tracks....”
“It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.”
“Music is the universal language of mankind.”
“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheardAre sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.”
“It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.”
“If you must write prose or poems, the words you use should be your own. Don't plagiarize or take 'on loan'. There's always someone, somewhere, with a big nose, who knows, who'll trip you up and lau...”
“Poetry, plays, novels, music, they are the cry of the human spirit trying to understand itself and make sense of our world.”
“In scientific thinking are always present elements of poetry. Science and music requires a thought homogeneous.”
“Poetry is the language of the soul;Poetic Prose, the language of my heart.Each line must flow as in a song,and strike a chord that rings forever.To me, words are music!”
“Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.”
“We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind. Orpheus shrinks to a poet when he looks back, with the impatience of reason, on a music stronger than death.”
“For a short while she considered the idea of orchestral courtesy. Certainly one should avoid giving political offence: German orchestras, of course, used to be careful about playing Wagner abroad, ...”
“The only justification for looking down on anyone, is that you're going to stop and pick them up.”
“I would rather write 10,000 notes than a single letter of the alphabet.”
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's really a stupid thing to want to do.”
