Claude Debussy Quotes

When asked by a grumpily puzzled professor what "rules" he followed, Debussy is said to have retorted, mon plaisir "whatever I please" and he further claimed that more was to be gained by watching the sun rise than by listening to the Pastoral Symphony. Although such remarks were intended to shock, they contain a core of Debussyan verity ...

He was the incomparable painter of mystery, silence, and the infinite, of the passing cloud, and the sunlit shimmer of the waves-subleties which none before him had been capable of suggesting.

If we look at the works of JS Bach ... on each page we discover things which we thought were born only yesterday, from delightful arabesques to an overflowing of religious feeling greater than anything we have since discovered.

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

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

Art is the most beautiful of all lies.

Music is in the space between the notes.

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

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

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

Proust is long-winded, precious, and a bit of an old woman

The worship of Adonis is united with that of Christ .

But music, don't you know, is a dream from which the veils have been lifted. It's not even the expression of a feeling, it's the feeling itself.

Music begins where words are powerless to express. Music is made for the inexpressible. I want music to seem to rise from the shadows and indeed sometimes to return to them.

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

What I am trying to do is something different an effect of reality, but what some fools call Impressionism , a term that is usually misapplied, especially by the critics who don't hesitate to apply it to Turner , the greatest creator of mysterious effects in the whole world of art.

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

Anyone who calls my music "impressionist" is an imbecile.

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

There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. I love music passionately. And because l love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. It is a free art gushing forth, an open-air art boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea. It must never be shut in and become an academic art.

The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous will happen.

Art is the most beautiful deception of all. And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.

The age of automobiles and aeroplanes cannot express itself in the same manner as did the age of the diligence.

The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.

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

The sound of the sea, the curve of a horizon, wind in leaves, the cry of a bird leave manifold impression in us. And suddenly, without our wishing it at all, one of these memories spills from us and finds expression in musical language ... I want to sing my interior landscape with the simple artlessness of a child.

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

Do not allow the accents in the brass to produce space between the notes.

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

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

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

Art is of absolutely no use to the masses