Quotes About Quartets

#1. As an improviser I'm now pretty comfortable with trios, so I'm thinking of working up to quartets.

Fred Frith

#2. It seems to me the structure of the Quartets is too imposed.

Paul Muldoon

#3. I love to write quartets. One could say that this is a mania.

Heitor Villa-Lobos

#4. The playwright Edward Albee has characterized [the suddenness of the appearance of fruits and flowers in evolutionary history] as 'that heartbreaking second when it all got together: the sugars and the acids and the ultraviolets, and the next thing you knew there were tangerines and string quartets.

Adam Leith Gollner

#5. I realized very early that I was never going to make by living by writing string quartets. But I wanted to write music and I didn't want to have to do anything else.

Richard Rodney Bennett

#6. The great thing about string quartets is the players are kind of like family. They work really well as a unit, so you can write things that let them use those talents of association and intuition-all the things they've developed together as a group.

Terry Riley

#7. We spend most of the day together at school, but not in a way that limits our interactions with other people. If anything, we incorporate our friends into what we have between us. We exist as individuals. We exist as a pair. We exist as parts of trios, quartets, and so on. And it all feels right.

David Levithan

#8. I grew up listening to the quartets and I loved that so much that I wanted to see if I could make music and make it happen. It was just a series of events ... me going to concerts and saying "I think I can do that".

Bill Gaither

#9. I cannot work and listen to Wagner at the same time, nor Mahler, nor Beethoven's late quartets. I enjoy listening to Chopin's piano music when I work.

I.M. Pei

#10. Beethoven's string quartets express pain itself; it is not MY pain.

Karen Armstrong

#11. I tried to resist his overtures, but he plied me with symphonies, quartets, chamber music, and cantatas.

S.J Perelman

#12. Shostakovich's final pieces, his quartets, are scratching the surface of another world.

Simon McBurney

#13. The Quartets have been a major part of my work.

Elliott Carter

#14. Beethoven's last quartets were written by a deaf man and should only be listened to by a deaf man.

Thomas Beecham

#15. Some people write string quartets, some grow lettuce and tomatoes. There have to be a few who build railroad stations,

Haruki Murakami

#16. [Art] would have helped us survive in the Pleistocene - in the period, say, 1.6 million years ago until fairly recently. The kind of imaginative abilities that artists have and that we all have in the appreciation of art - to appreciate Jane Austen, the late quartets of Beethoven.

Denis Dutton

#17. We used to play the underground clubs like the UFO, and Middle Earth, and they were great because they would have on things like a poet, string quartets, and then a rock band! It was kinda cool!

Alvin Lee

#18. There was one thing Beethoven didn't do. When one of his string quartets was played, you can believe the second violin wasn't improvising.

Wynton Marsalis

#19. Part of me is probably more conservative than people realise. I like my old string quartets, I don't like music that's trippy for trippy's sake.

Bjork

#20. The pieces that have survived, the ones that we all love, were not all popular in their time. Just look at Beethoven's late string quartets. The music that the musical community selects, however, is usually the very best.

David Finckel

#21. In his late quartets, Beethoven introduces an element that shouldn't be there, that should be left for meditation, though I love them. I can see that through them came Wagner and Mahler and Schoenberg and Berg. And then came Tracey Emin. And I can see it all as one downward path.

John Tavener

#22. T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell," and Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. I

Robin Rinaldi

#23. While I'm working, I stick with music that won't distract me - the dub stylings of Scientist and King Tubby, maybe some Beethoven string quartets.

Adam Mansbach

#24. There are no more barbershop quartets wearing boaters, even though I still like them. Life goes on.

Tina Weymouth

#25. My dad used to sing in a quartet. He loved everything: adult contemporary, anything smooth. He'd listen to the quartets.

Keri Hilson

#26. I listen to music when I write. I need the musical background. Classical music. I'm behind the times. I'm still with Baroque music, Gregorian chant, the requiems, and with the quartets of Beethoven and Brahms. That is what I need for the climate, for the surroundings, for the landscape: the music.

Elie Wiesel

#27. My wife and I just started listening to the late Beethoven Quartets together, an activity I recommend for all married couples, but that doesn't really mean that I'm finished reading.

Clive James

#28. These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.

John Cheever

#29. The past and future / Are conquered, and reconciled.

T. S. Eliot

#30. In order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by the way of dispossession.

T. S. Eliot

#31. I would give my best quartet for a good razor,

Joseph Haydn

#32. There is, it seems to us, At best, only a limited value In the knowledge derived from experience.

T. S. Eliot