Glenn Gould Quotes

#1. There is a craft and a power in listening.

Glenn Gould

#2. 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.

Glenn Gould

#3. 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.

Glenn Gould

#4. Mozart died too late rather than too soon.

Glenn Gould

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

Glenn Gould

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

Glenn Gould

#7. [Bach is the] reason I became a musician

Glenn Gould

#8. U201Che G-minor Symphony consists of eight remarkable measures surrounded by a half-hour of banality.

Glenn Gould

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

Glenn Gould

#10. Isolation is the indispensable component of human happiness.

Glenn Gould

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

Glenn Gould

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

Glenn Gould

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

Glenn Gould

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

Glenn Gould

#15. 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.

Glenn Gould

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

Glenn Gould

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

Glenn Gould

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

Glenn Gould

#19. 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.

Glenn Gould

#20. 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.

Glenn Gould

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

Glenn Gould

#22. 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.

Glenn Gould

#23. 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.

Glenn Gould

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

Glenn Gould