Segovia Quotes & Sayings

I've had three wives and three guitars. I still play the guitars. — Andres Segovia

It is not so hard to be original, what is hard, is to be original with continuity. — Andres Segovia

My prayer to the Lord every day, is this-I have been a great sinner. I do not deserve Heaven. Let me stay here. — Andres Segovia

Whoever heard of an electric violin, electric cello or, for that matter, an electric singer? — Andres Segovia

The guitar is the easiest instrument to play and the hardest to play well. — Andres Segovia

When one puts up a building one makes an elaborate scaffold to get everything into its proper place. But when one takes the scaffold down, the building must stand by itself with no trace of the means by which it was erected. That is how a musician should work. — Andres Segovia

When I started to play with my fingernails, it was not just for volume. The most important thing was giving the guitar different colors in its voices ... — Andres Segovia

(I was) my own teacher and pupil, and thanks to the efforts of both, they were not discontented with each other. — Andres Segovia

It is impossible to feign mastery of an instrument, however skillful the impostor may be. — Andres Segovia

A man without patience is a lamp without oil. — Andres Segovia

Record the album after the tour. — Andres Segovia

The piano is a monster that screams when you touch its teeth. — Andres Segovia

The guitar is the most unpredictable and least reliable musical instrument in existence ... and also the sweetest, the warmest, the most delicate, whose melancholic voice awakes in our soul exquisite reveries. — Andres Segovia

Lean your body forward slightly to support the guitar against your chest, for the poetry of the music should resound in your heart. — Andres Segovia

Cities have often been compared to language: you can read a city, it's said, as you read a book. But the metaphor can be inverted. The journeys we make during the reading of a book trace out, in some way, the private spaces we inhabit. There are texts that will always be our dead-end streets; fragments that will be bridges; words that will be like the scaffolding that protects fragile constructions. T.S. Eliot: a plant growing in the debris of a ruined building; Salvador Novo: a tree-lined street transformed into an expressway; Tomas Segovia: a boulevard, a breath of air; Roberto Bolano: a rooftop terrace; Isabel Allende: a (magically real) shopping mall; Gilles Deleuze: a summit; and Jacques Derrida: a pothole. Robert Walser: a chink in the wall, for looking through to the other side; Charles Baudelaire: a waiting room; Hannah Arendt: a tower, an Archimedean point; Martin Heidegger: a cul-de-sac; Walter Benjamin: a one-way street walked down against the flow. — Valeria Luiselli

You know what I think? If I am tired now, I don't mind, because I have eternity to rest. — Andres Segovia

My ex-wife was trying to be nice once, so she took me to a concert in Los Angeles. I went with her to Symphony Hall, and the orchestra was playing. When the show started, the spotlight was sharp on this one man (Andres Segovia) and he had sombrero on and his guitar propped up like this and, oh man ... he was a master ! - I really heard it. That one guitar sounded like a whole orchestra to me. — B.B. King

I belong to the scarce minority of artists who work in good faith, around whom the phenomenal world vanishes, as it happens to the mystics when they give themselves to prayer. — Andres Segovia

Phantom
Your heart must be a ghost.
I can feel it mounting; a dark wave -
upon the night of my soul — Segovia Amil

When I began, the guitar was en-closed in a vicious circle. There were no composers writing for the guitar, be-cause there were no virtuoso guitarists. — Andres Segovia

I was my own teacher and pupil, in a comradeship so firm and persevering that the most trying incidents of my life served only to strengthen the union ... — Andres Segovia

It is always about discovering what, hidden, does not lie on the paper. — Andres Segovia

The guitar is a small orchestra. It is polyphonic. Every string is a different color, a different voice. — Andres Segovia

The advice I am giving always to all my students is above all to study the music profoundly ... music is like the ocean, and the instruments are little or bigger islands, very beautiful for the flowers and trees. — Andres Segovia

Andres Segovia literally created the genre of classical guitar, which hadn't existed before around 1910. There was flamenco, which he borrowed from, but he actually arranged the works of Mozart and other classical composers for guitar, something that had never been done before ... Segovias' style is not slick or contrived, but it's still very clean and his timing is impeccable ... it's got a feeling of casual elegance, as if he's sitting around the house in Spain with a jug of wine, just playing from the heart. — Roger McGuinn

I've had only three wives and three guitars in my life, though I've flirted with others. — Andres Segovia

Andres Segovia, the great name for guitar, he put classical guitar on the map. He was the proponent of it, the best in the world. So I was listening to a record that he had made, and a little bauble happened in the middle of the record. A finger slipped, and I said, 'Wait a minute. He's not allowed to make mistakes,' - my mind. — George Benson

Sometimes one is without the pleasure of playing. But when the silence of the audience is perfect, we recover that. — Andres Segovia

Letter 33 [To a discalced Carmelite nun in Segovia[63] Ubeda, October-November 1591] ... Have a great love for those who contradict and fail to love you, for in this way love is begotten in a heart that has no love. God so acts with us, for he loves us that we might love by means of the very love he bears toward us. [63] This person's identify is unknown. — San Juan De La Cruz

Among God's creatures two, the dog and the guitar, have taken all the sizes and all the shapes, in order not to be separated from the man. — Andres Segovia

Among God's creations, two, the dog and the guitar, have taken all the sizes and all the shapes in order not to be seperated from the man. -Andres Segovia — Andres Segovia

Hearing Andres Segovia in person was quite a revelation ... It was a knockout ... — Julian Bream

Every guitarist has a special quality of sound. The best ones will use a good ear, much sensitivity and a thorough knowledge of music to prepare the nuances and colors of sound. — Andres Segovia