Glenn Gould Quotes

Once I turned pro, so to speak, I put away childish things forever.

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.

The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but rather the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.

There is a craft and a power in listening.

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

[Bach is the] reason I became a musician

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

One does not play the piano with one's fingers, one plays the piano with one's mind.

The nature of the contrapuntal experience is that every note has to have a past and a future on the horizontal plane.

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

The purpose of art is the lifelong construction of a state of wonder.

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

I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the music of any one composer during all that time, that composer would almost certainly be Bach. I really can’t think of any other music which is so all-encompassing, which moves me so deeply and so consistently, and which, to use a rather imprecise word, is valuable beyond all of its skill and brilliance for something more meaningful than that — its humanity.

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.)

I don't know what the effective ratio would be, but I've always had some sort of intuition that for every hour you spend in the company of other human beings, you need "x" number of hours alone. Now, what "x" represents I don't really know; it might be two and seven-eighths or seven and two-eighths, but it is a substantial ratio.

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.

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.

Isolation is the indispensable component of human happiness.

Mozart died too late rather than too soon.

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