Glenn Gould Quotes & Sayings

Once I turned pro, so to speak, I put away childish things forever. — Glenn Gould

I don't know what the effective ratio would be, but I've always had some sort of intuition that for every hour you spend in the company of other human beings, you need "x" number of hours alone. Now, what "x" represents I don't really know; it might be two and seven-eighths or seven and two-eighths, but it is a substantial ratio. — Glenn Gould

A record is a concert without halls and a museum whose curator is the owner. — Glenn Gould

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 it differently, to establish the music's difference, vis-a-vis our own difference. — Glenn Gould

One does not play the piano with one's fingers, one plays the piano with one's mind. — Glenn Gould

The final, unfinished fugue from The Art of Fugue is the greatest piece of music ever composed. — Glenn Gould

Whenever one honestly defies a tradition, one becomes, in reality, the more responsible to it. — Glenn Gould

My moods are inversely related to the clarity of the sky. — Glenn Gould

[Bach is the] reason I became a musician — Glenn Gould

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. — Glenn Gould

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 closely rivaled by the indifference of the performing style, is actually surpassed only by the ineptitude of the studio production method. (Strawberry Fields suggests a chance encounter at a mountain wedding between Claudio Monteverdi and a jug band.) — Glenn Gould

The justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men, and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. — Glenn Gould

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 and serenity. — Glenn Gould

Isolation is the indispensable component of human happiness. — Glenn Gould

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 an obverse, that it is hewn from negation, that it is but very small security against the void of negation which surrounds it. — Glenn Gould

The nature of the contrapuntal experience is that every note has to have a past and a future on the horizontal plane. — Glenn Gould

If an artist wants to use his mind for creative work, cutting oneself off from society is a necessary thing — Glenn Gould

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 music of any one composer during all that time, that composer would almost certainly be Bach. — Glenn Gould

I tend to follow a very nocturnal sort of existence mainly because I don't much care for sunlight. Bright colors of any kind depress me, in fact. And my moods are more or less inversely related to the clarity of the sky, on any given day ... my private motto has always been that behind every silver lining there is a cloud. — Glenn Gould

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 me rule of mob law. — Glenn Gould

Mozart died too late rather than too soon. — Glenn Gould

I don't approve of people who watch television, but I am one of them. — Glenn Gould

I always assumed everybody shared my love for overcast skies. It came as a shock to find out that some people prefer sunshine. — Glenn Gould

The prerequisite of contrapuntal art, more conspicuous in the work of Bach than in that of any other composer, is an ability to conceive a priori of melodic identities which when transposed, inverted, made retrograde, or transformed rhythmically will yet exhibit, in conjunction with the original subject matter, some entirely new but completely harmonious profile. — Glenn Gould

U201Che G-minor Symphony consists of eight remarkable measures surrounded by a half-hour of banality. — Glenn Gould

The purpose of art is the lifelong construction of a state of wonder. — Glenn Gould

There is a craft and a power in listening. — Glenn Gould

I've always had a sort of intuition that for every hour you spend with other human beings you need x number of hours alone. Now, what that x represents I don't really know, whether it be two and seven-eights or seven and two-eights, but it's a substantial ratio. — Glenn Gould