Michael Tippett Quotes

#1. I am quite certain in my heart of hearts that modern music and modern art is not a conspiracy, but is a form of truth and integrity for those who practise it honestly, decently and with all their being.

Michael Tippett

#2. I remain a humanist. We are a very curious race.

Michael Tippett

#3. Shiva danced the world into existence ... that's a very nice thought.

Michael Tippett

#4. I have realized that for those who live in the West, freedom is so often something they take for granted. It has always been there for them. It is their unnoticed, unrecognized, constant companion and friend. But for those of us who come from countries like Sudan, freedom is wonderful and precious.

Mende Nazer

#5. Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

Michael Tippett

#6. Beethoven suppressed everything, his personal life disappeared until he was locked inside. That is a figure quite extreme.

Michael Tippett

#7. When we use terms we get confused, yet we have no other way.

Michael Tippett

#8. I've seldom become nostalgic or settled.

Michael Tippett

#9. Public notice does not necessarily accord with internal fulfilment.

Michael Tippett

#10. Travel and society polish one, but a rolling stone gathers no moss, and a little moss is a good thing on a man.

John Burroughs

#11. The deceitful misquoting of scientists to suit an anti-scientific agenda ranks among the many unchristian habits of fundamentalist authors.

Richard Dawkins

#12. Music remains the most strange of the materials because we don't understand what happens when music moves you.

Michael Tippett

#13. This is something special. You can attempt to have a kind of non-living music.

Michael Tippett

#14. I'm outside the music I've made. I have no interest in it.

Michael Tippett

#15. YES! STOP FIGHTING RIGHT NOW! POLAND NEEDS CARROTS TOO!

America

#16. The blues are like the fugue in 18th century. It's probably the music that belongs most to our time.

Michael Tippett

#17. Nature has different times.

Michael Tippett

#18. How my achievements mock me!

William Shakespeare

#19. What he hates about whisky hangovers, he thinks now, is the synthesis they achieve between the spiritual and the gastric, as if your soul needs to throw up or your stomach has realised life is meaningless.

Ned Beauman

#20. There is no stimulus like that which comes from the consciousness of knowing that others believe in us.

Orison Swett Marden

#21. The nearest figure to myself would be Shakespeare.

Michael Tippett

#22. I think we're all pretty odd.

Michael Tippett

#23. Music is a performance and needs the audience.

Michael Tippett

#24. The Greek sculptor - I don't think he was very different from any of us.

Michael Tippett

#25. Conductors don't suffer, they are part of the performance.

Michael Tippett

#26. Shakespeare fascinated me. He hardly ever left the country. His imagination was worldwide though reading.

Michael Tippett

#27. Music is a performing art, as any Native American will tell you. It isn't there in the score.

Michael Tippett

#28. Characters are an extreme form in Shakespeare's theater.

Michael Tippett

#29. I'm not like Wolverine, but I can heal fast.

Zoe Forward

#30. My true function within a society which embraces all of us is to continue an age-old tradition. This tradition is to create images from the depths of the imagination and to give them form, whether visual, intellectual or musical.

Michael Tippett