Claude Debussy Quotes

How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling.

In opera, there is always too much singing.

Inspiration and ideas only come to me when I have not had a woman in a very long time... Ballads, polonaises, even a whole concerto may have been lost forever up your des durka, I can't tell you how many. I have been so deeply engulfed in my love for you I have hardly created anything.

People don't very much like things that are beautiful - they are so far from their nasty little minds.

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 deception of all!

Music is the space between the notes.

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

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.

Beauty seems to strike some people as a personal affront.

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

Composers aren't daring enough. They're afraid of that sacred idol called 'common sense', which is the most dreadful thing I know - after all, it's no more than a religion founded to excuse the ubiquity of imbeciles!

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

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

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.

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

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

I am more and more convinced that music is not, in essence, a thing which can be cast into a traditional and fixed form. It is made up of colors and rhythms.

Extreme complication is contrary to art.

[on Richard Wagner] A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.

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.

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

Music is in the space between the notes.

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

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 may happen.

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

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.

Peter Townsend Music is the silence between the notes.. So could it be said that dance is the stillness between the steps?

There is nothing more musical than a sunset. He who feels what he sees will find no more beautiful example of development in all that book which, alas, musicians read but too little - the book of Nature.

Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear.

Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind.

Life is the space between our things.

Beauty must appeal to the senses, must provide us with immediate enjoyment, must impress us or insinuate itself into us without any effort on our part.

The century of aeroplanes deserves its own music. As there are no precedents, I must create anew.

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.

I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.

I have a horror of sentimentality, and I cannot forget that its name is Saint-Saëns.

There is nothing more musical than a sunset.

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

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.

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

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

The trouble with the opera is there's always to much singing.

If I am not making music, I have no reason for existing.

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.