Top 77 Debussy's Quotes
#1. For me, playing music while I write is important. Several of the romantic scenes in 'Paris' were written with Debussy's 'String Quartet,' his 'L'Apres-midi d'une Faune,' or Canteloube's 'Songs of the Auvergne' playing in the background.
Edward Rutherfurd
#2. soothing: re-press of an old French recording of Ida Presti, possibly the greatest guitarist who ever lived, and her husband Alexandre Lagoya, pairing on Debussy's "Clair de Lune.
Jonathan Kellerman
#3. 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
#4. The age of automobiles and aeroplanes cannot express itself in the same manner as did the age of the diligence.
Claude Debussy
#6. Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.
Claude Debussy
#7. I love Italian opera - it's so reckless. Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death. Damn Debussy, and his averted face. I like the Italians who run all on impulse, and don't care about their immortal souls, and don't worry about the ultimate.
D.H. Lawrence
#8. People come to music to seek oblivion: is that not also a form of deception?
Claude Debussy
#9. Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear. There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law.
Claude Debussy
#10. If I am not making music, I have no reason for existing.
Claude Debussy
#12. Erik Satie does not say the opposite of Debussy; he says the same thing only the other way round.
Jose Bergamin
#13. The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.
Claude Debussy
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. People don't very much like things that are beautiful.. they are so far from their nasty little minds.
Claude Debussy
#17. 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
#18. Century-old records are the closest thing we have to a time machine. To listen to the voice of Theodore Roosevelt or the piano playing of Claude Debussy is to feel the years falling away like autumn leaves from a maple tree.
Terry Teachout
#19. Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.
Claude Debussy
#20. There is nothing is 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.
Claude Debussy
#22. Although I am basically self taught, I consider Debussy my teacher - the most important elements are colour, light and shadow.
Toru Takemitsu
#23. Collect impressions. Don't be in a hurry to write them down. Because that's something music can do better than painting: it can centralise variations of colour and light within a single picture a truth generally ignored, obvious as it is.
Claude Debussy
#24. I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.
Claude Debussy
#25. I sing in languages that I speak. So when I'm singing a Schubert song, I know precisely what every word means and, you know, when it was composed and who was the poet and all of that and whether Strauss or Wagner or French Belioz, Duparc or Debussy or whatever.
Jessye Norman
#26. 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
#27. 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!
Claude Debussy
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.
Claude Debussy
#34. 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
#35. Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes.
Claude Debussy
#36. I wish to sing of my interior visions with the naive candour of a child.
Claude Debussy
#37. I've always been a fan of the melancholy, like Morrissey. I grew up playing classical nocturnes like Chopin and Debussy on piano, so I write really melancholy lyrics and melodies
Blake Lewis
#38. The trouble with the opera is there's always to much singing.
Claude Debussy
#39. Beauty seems to strike some people as a personal affront.
Claude Debussy
#40. 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
#41. Debussy
A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.
H.L. Mencken
#44. Anyone who calls my music "impressionist" is an imbecile.
Claude Debussy
#45. 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.
Claude Debussy
#46. 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
#47. The worship of Adonis is united with that of Christ .
Claude Debussy
#48. 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
#50. 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
#51. On those who overanalyze his music: When you tear the wings off a butterfly, it is no longer a butterfly
Claude Debussy
#52. 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
#53. 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.
Claude Debussy
#54. The impressionists, Debussy, Faure, in France, did take a few steps forward.
Pierre Schaeffer
#55. Do not allow the accents in the brass to produce space between the notes.
Claude Debussy
#56. 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
#57. There is no theory. You merely have to listen. Pleasure is the law.
Claude Debussy
#58. 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
#59. Peter Townsend Music is the silence between the notes.. So could it be said that dance is the stillness between the steps?
Claude Debussy
#60. All that was a dream, you couldn't hold on, you couldn't depend on frosted glass and Debussy.
Janet Fitch
#61. First of all, ladies and gentlemen, you must forget that you are singers.
Claude Debussy
#62. Claude Debussy was a rare phenomenon a composer profoundly and subversively revolutionary ...
Claude Debussy
#63. Claude Debussy defined the guitar as an expressive harpsicord. I believe that is the best definition ever given of the Spanish guitar. This phrase is the starting point for my Concierto de Aranjuez Our guitar is the only survivor of the rich and anarchic instrumental wildlife of the Middle Ages.
Joaquin Rodrigo
#65. Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind ...
Claude Debussy
#66. I think of a sun like Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, and birdcalls like Stravinsky. But the tempo is all mine.
Patricia Highsmith
#68. When I was younger, I used to do that a lot: I would hear a part of a song that would really relax me and then put it on repeat. That would send me to sleep. It was quite obvious classical music, people like Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel.
King Krule
#69. To complete a work is just like being present at the death of someone you love.
Claude Debussy
#70. The score of Pelleas and Melisande by Debussy, heralds that which will lift man from the earthly to the celestial, from the mortal to the immortal. Once again the ways of the artist and healer are merging.
Corinne Heline
#71. Do you think Duke Ellington didn't listen to Debussy? Louis Armstrong loved opera, did you know that? Name me a jazz pianist who wasn't influenced by European music!
Dave Brubeck
#72. How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling.
Claude Debussy
#73. I had no idea Stravinsky disliked Debussy so much as this.
Ernest Newman
#74. 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.
Claude Debussy
#75. The century of aeroplanes deserves its own music. As there are no precedents, I must create anew.
Claude Debussy
#76. 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
#77. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
