Top 33 Tavener Quotes
#1. William Tavener never heeded ominous forecasts in the domestic horizon, and he never looked for a storm until it broke.
Willa Cather
#2. My consultant keeps telling me sudden death could come at any moment.
John Tavener
#3. The thing I regret most about my life are those inane photos of me with icons. They used to come down here and dress me up, and I just tolerated it. It's my fault. But I shouldn't have done it. They literally brought down costumes, candles, and icons! It was unbelievable stupidity.
John Tavener
#4. I've written a very long piece of music recently, the 'Veil of the Temple,' which lasts about seven hours. It's really a kind of vigil. It takes place during the night, waiting for the resurrection of Christ.
John Tavener
#5. Most women would say they relate to 'Hedda Gabler' - there's a part of her in them. Ibsen was writing about a deep ambivalence that many women feel about domesticity. I think about myself and friends of mine - we have some of Hedda's qualities and traits.
Annette Bening
#6. I've always been aware of mortality because I've always had ill health most of my life.
John Tavener
#7. My way towards God has been to write music.
John Tavener
#8. Hildegard von Bingen conveys spiritual ecstasy, if we're talking of Western music. What bothers me about Western music is that it doesn't have an esoteric dimension in the way the music of the East has, whether it be Byzantine chant, the music of the Sufis, or Hindu music.
John Tavener
#10. 'The Whale' was in the category of so-called serious music, and yet it brings together a wide series of musical styles. It was influenced by people such as The Beatles, the spirit of the times, and I think 'The Whale' certainly had a pop element to it.
John Tavener
#11. Operna did not understand this habit of Indian men. If they could letch at her so overtly, they might as well ask her directly who she was. Why did they always turn to someone else and say, 'Wont you introduce us?' It was so pathetic.
Manu Joseph
#12. then he spluttered at me, "You impossible, wretched, nonsensical contradiction, what on earth have you done now?" I
Naomi Novik
#13. Suffering is a kind of ecstasy in a way. Having pain all the time makes me terribly, terribly grateful for every moment I've got.
John Tavener
#14. The music is something outside myself that's also inside myself ... Music and a sense of another presence always went hand in hand. Even when I was three, I would improvise music, and my maternal grandfather would act as an audience and used to applaud. I would imitate things like thunder and rain.
John Tavener
#15. I've got great joy from rediscovering Western music. I love Schumann and Chopin, and those amazing symphonies of Bruckner.
John Tavener
#16. I used to think there was something dirty about being paid for something which is a sacred thing to do. I can't disconnect the act of writing music from the act of prayer. If anyone tries to stop me working, it feels like someone is trying to stop me from taking communion.
John Tavener
#17. I think there will always be a possibility that God doesn't exist because He is infinitude and into that infinitude must come that possibility.
John Tavener
#18. I was having these terrible back pains, and then one day in Switzerland, things got very bad. My wife Maryanna called the hotel doctor, but I don't remember any of this, I was out of it. I had an operation, and I was nearly lost.
John Tavener
#19. If the Constitution can be used against one, it can be used against all.
Mumia Abu-Jamal
#20. I don't think Beethoven expresses religious truth. He expresses a human truth.
John Tavener
#21. 'Canticum Sacrum' is wonderfully archaic. What Stravinsky does is extraordinary. It takes you on a journey from Gregorian chant right through to the modernism of Webern - and all in 17 minutes.
John Tavener
#22. The path I follow is still an Orthodox path. You have to follow a path; otherwise, it becomes a little bit new-age, a bit of this, a bit of that.
John Tavener
#23. 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
#24. There was something compelling about a man who refused to wear pants in winter.
Kai Strand
#25. I think I've been very lucky all my life because the writing and the faith seem to go together.
John Tavener
#26. We seem to have lost our contact with the primordial: the idea of - call it divine revelation as opposed to something that's learned by the human intellect - something that, if you lay yourself completely open, and you just open your heart completely, something will actually come into it.
John Tavener
#27. Every Democrat says he wants to be JFK while insisting that he will do more or less what LBJ did. No Democrat would dream of saying he wanted to emulate Lyndon Johnson, because the myth is what matters most.
Jonah Goldberg
#28. Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience.
Isaiah Berlin
#29. Some people can never understand that you have to wait, even for the best of things, until the right time comes.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#30. I don't hate pop music. I liked the Beatles, but then, I knew them.
John Tavener
#31. The design of the building addresses the public nature of both the urban context and the internal program. In order to reinforce the building's associative or mimetic qualities, the facades are organized in a classical three-part division of base, middle or body, and attic or head.
Michael Graves
#32. Every woman I have known has actually deepened my spiritual awareness. Even if I have been a selfish man and treated them badly ... There were two women, I won't name them, who had a powerful religious effect on me. The ancient idea of a muse is there.
John Tavener
#33. Oh, we"re just scattering some dead fish about town, breaking some windows, photographing naked guys, hanging out in sky-scraper lobbies at three-fifteen in the morning, that kind of thing. "Not much", I answered.
John Green
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