Glenn Gould Quotes

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

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.)

There is a craft and a power in listening.

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

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

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.

My moods are inversely related to the clarity of the sky.

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 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.

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.

In the best of all possible worlds, art would be unnecessary. Its offer of restorative, placative therapy would go begging a patient. The professional specialization involved in its making would be presumption. The generalities of its applicability would be an affront. The audience would be the artist and their life would be art.

Isolation is the indispensable component of human happiness.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.