Jascha Quotes

#1. Why would one ever be so insane as to ditch a perfectly beautiful metaphor? Cut back, of course, prune if you like, so that the best metaphors are clear and sparkling. But I will throw out unread the book that promises me no metaphors inside.

Marie Rutkoski

#2. Can you appreciate music without playing it? Yes, you can. You can appreciate baseball without playing it. Many people attend a football game merely for the crowd, the excitement, the color.

Jascha Heifetz

#3. The discipline of practice every day is essential. When I skip a day, I notice a difference in my playing. After two days, the critics notice, and after three days, so does the audience.

Jascha Heifetz

#4. If the Almighty himself played the violin, the credits would still read 'Rubinstein, God, and Piatigorsky', in that order.

Jascha Heifetz

#5. I go and see anything that's visually new, any technology that's about picture-making. The technology won't make the pictures different, but someone using it will.

David Hockney

#6. I need to spend a bit of time with you as well, alone and without any terrible music blaring in our ears. How can people possibly like that?

Paulo Coelho

#7. No matter what side of an argument you're on, you always find some people on your side that wish you were on the other side.

Jascha Heifetz

#8. Enough of anything is plenty, but plenty to some people is never enough.

Sophie Irene Loeb

#9. The zenith of virtuosity, a violinist like Jascha Heifetz, the supernatural in a pianist like Vladimir Horowitz, these are performers who were so idiosyncratic and personal that to imitate them would be like filling somebody else's bottle with your wine.

David Finckel

#10. He once told a reporter he wanted his obituary to be short - "just make it born in Russia, first lesson at 3, debut at 7, debut in America in 1917".

Jascha Heifetz

#11. Criticism does not disturb me, for I am my own severest critic. Always in my playing I strive to surpass myself, and it is this constant struggle that makes music fascinating to me.

Jascha Heifetz

#12. Women have been deceiving men since the Garden of Eden. They've had centuries of practice.

Michael Schmicker

#13. For Jascha, artistic creation was the most private activity in the world: the soul's sacred and solitary communion with itself. (p. 244)

Rebecca Goldstein

#14. Love doesn't demand perfection, but it does ask you to give yourself with less reserve than you'd prefer.

Thomas Moore

#15. If I don't practice one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, the public knows it.

Jascha Heifetz

#16. Barron's stuck teaching me. It's supposed to be just for a few months, until I graduate from Wallingford. Let's see if we can stand each other that long.

Holly Black

#17. Some things happened and some other things didn't, and at one point I found I'd gone to a place where I married Jascha. Pyotr Frankis had been right: life was funny. It was also reasonably good and so was the relationship. And after the divorce, I got a job.

Pat Cadigan

#18. Practice like it means everything in the world to you. Perform like you don't give a damn.

Jascha Heifetz

#19. I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.

Jascha Heifetz

#20. When people come to play music as they do to play bridge, civilization will have taken the longest stride forward since the beginning of time.

Jascha Heifetz

#21. The instances of honesty that one comes across in this world are just as amazing as the instances of dishonesty. After forty-five years of mixing with one's kind, one ought to have acquired the habit of being able to know something about one's fellow beings. But one doesn't

Ford Madox Ford

#22. There is no top. There are always further heights to reach.

Jascha Heifetz

#23. I have discovered three things which know no geographical borders - classical music, American jazz, and applause as the sign of the public's favor.

Jascha Heifetz