Debussy Quotes

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. ~ Claude Debussy

Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light. ~ Claude Debussy

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 ... ~ Claude Debussy

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

The impressionists, Debussy, Faure, in France, did take a few steps forward. ~ Pierre Schaeffer

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. ~ Claude Debussy

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. ~ Claude Debussy

I have no doubt that there are great people about though ... the thing of it is, nothing to this day moves me like classical music (Debussy, Vaughn Williams). ~ Gary Lucas

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

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. ~ Claude Debussy

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. ~ Claude Debussy

Nothing more then nothing can be said.
We make our lives by what we love.
Being American, having been trained to be sentimental, I fought for noises … when the war came along, I decided to use only quiet sounds. There seemed to me to be no truth, no good, in anything big.
Somebody asked Debussy how he wrote music. He said: "I take all the tones there are, leave out he one's I don't want, and use all the others". Satie said: "When I was young, people told me; you'll see when you're fifty years old. Now I'm fifty. I've seen nothing".
Slowly as the talk goes on, we are getting nowhere – and that is a pleasure.
It is not irritating to be where one is, it is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.
If anybody is sleepy, let him go to sleep.
All I know about method is that when I'm not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I'm working, it is quit clear I know nothing. ~ John Cage

Anyone who calls my music "impressionist" is an imbecile. ~ Claude Debussy

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. ~ Claude Debussy

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

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. ~ Claude Debussy

For ten years, I went to piano lessons. I don't think I'm a very musical person, and the theory quite defeated me, but I had a freak aptitude for Debussy and Ravel. ~ Ronald Frame

I'd heard "Rhapsody in Blue" a thousand times and it always amazed me. It was so humble and then so bombastic. It was beautiful, bright, and terrifying: old and new, European and American. At times it sounded like Debussy, at times it sounded like Stravinsky, and at times it sounded like the Lower East Side in 1910.
"Rhapsody in Blue" was a quintessentially New York work of art, but it was also about moving from east to west, from the old world to the new... ~ Moby

When Debussy was seeming to get nowhere with an opera he was composing, he put it this way: "I spent my days pursuing the nothingness -le rien - it creates." My job is to create that void, that rien.
Hunting knife ~ Haruki Murakami

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

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

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. ~ Claude Debussy

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

All that was a dream, you couldn't hold on, you couldn't depend on frosted glass and Debussy. ~ Janet Fitch

Debussy
A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one. ~ H.L. Mencken

I think of a sun like Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, and birdcalls like Stravinsky. But the tempo is all mine. ~ Patricia Highsmith

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

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

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

Erik Satie does not say the opposite of Debussy; he says the same thing only the other way round. ~ Jose Bergamin

Music is in the space between the notes. ~ Claude Debussy

I am a classical fan. I like Debussy a lot, so I was trying to learn it on the piano. I've learned like a third of it, but I think I'm getting to a section that may be beyond my skill level. ~ Charlie Day

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

Art is of absolutely no use to the masses ~ Claude Debussy

My mother was a very talented pianist, and she was a music teacher who hated to teach music, actually, but she loved to play, so I was brought up with Chopin, Debussy and Mozart. ~ Peter C. Doherty

Art is the most beautiful of all lies. ~ Claude Debussy

If you go to Japan for instance, you should know that they have a different way of playing Beethoven or Brahms. But if you play with them Mozart, Debussy, Mendelssohn, they have a wonderful light feeling for that. ~ Kurt Masur

I loved Debussy, Stravinsky, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, anything with romantic melodies, especially the nocturnes. Nietzsche was a hero, especially with 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra.' He gets a bad rap; he's very misunderstood. He's a maker of individuals, and he was a teacher of teachers. ~ Joni Mitchell

Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art. ~ Claude Debussy

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

I wasn't trying to reach England. or Paris. I thought that if I made the broadcast powerful enough, my brother would hear me. That I could bring him some peace, protect him as he had always protected me."

You'd play your brother's own voice to him? After he died?"

"And Debussy."

Did he ever talk back?"

The attic ticks. What ghosts sidle along the walls right now, trying to overhear? She can almost taste her great-uncle's fright in the air.

"No," he says. "He never did. ~ Anthony Doerr

What I've learned is that it's okay to take from heroes, such as Debussy, but it has to be filtered through my own personality so that ultimately it's me. ~ William Kraft

We all shared an admiration of Debussy both as a musician and as sort of an icon for the 20th century. It seemed like an interesting idea to go right back 100 years to find the source of some new ideas now. ~ Anne Dudley

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

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. ~ Claude Debussy

The worship of Adonis is united with that of Christ . ~ Claude Debussy

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

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. ~ Claude Debussy

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

For Debussy the musician and the man I have had profound admiration, but by nature I'm different from him. I think I have always personally followed a direction opposed to that of the symbolism of Debussy. ~ Maurice Ravel

I had no idea Stravinsky disliked Debussy so much as this. ~ Ernest Newman

And now, in honour of the 150th anniversary of Beethoven's death, I would like to play 'Clear the Saloon', er, 'Clair de Lune', by Debussy. I don't play Beethoven so well, but I play Debussy very badly, and Beethoven would have liked that. ~ Victor Borge