Quotes
Quotes about Music
When can a machine be also a living organism? When it is a piece of music.
We are moved by music in ways that words cannot describe, and such emotion can drive us to action - war, murder, love.
Works which probe the semiotics or the psychology of music are not, as a rule, helpful even to musicians.
Music is considered an international language, yet it tends to gross insularity.
Music and literature have this in common - that the dimension they work in is time.
The reality of literature, as opposed to its appearance in written of printed records, is the organization of speech sounds, and this makes literature a temporal art, a twin of music.
There is, one must admit, a large temptation to regard a musical text as a spatial territory for free wandering.
There are cerebral experiences of a nature too complex to be susceptible of expression through any medium except that of music
The content of music is tension and release, and its non-musical referents lie in a sphere of generalities that may be rolled into the arena of a political or moral tenet, but in itself music is apolitical and amoral.
Music treats film as it treated drama: it tries to convert it into a kind of novel
Music deals in sound without clear referents. Music is multiguous,since it is capable of many interpretations. Music, one might say, is Hopkinsian.
Music, unlike literature, can be both synchronic and diachronic: we can read or hear it horizontally, from left to right, and vertically, from top to bottom.
Prose can only get near music if, shedding meaning,it approaches noise
It is because literature has no power to imitate the sound of music that it is led to mockery of its sister art
Any serious literary artist envies music, which has an apparently self-referrÃng language, cannot preach or inform, and totally identifies form and content
It is in the nature of a structure to be as inexplicable as a passage of music
No one can judge a piece of music merely by hearing it; no one can judge a novel just by reading it
Music is not inert and arbitrary, but it is not iconic either. We do not know what it is, except a great and sustaining mystery. I do not think we know what literature is either.
The ideal reader of my books is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the same books that I have read
I shall never again know the aesthetic thrills which, from books and music and pictures, permeated my youth
Music is a purer art (than literature) because it has no direct relationship to human events. It is totally outside the field of moral judgment
Spending half an hour or an hour, or two hours, on a piece of narrative fiction gives us the same kind of holistic, the same kind of total effect, the effect of being absorbed in an artistic experience without interruption that we get from listening to a piece of music
I wish people would think of me as a musician who writes novels, instead of as a novelist who writes music on the side
Whatever the music critics say, I orchestrate well. I am in control of the tonal palette, or palate.
We musicians and writers, always on the move
