Claude Debussy Quotes
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There is no theory. You merely have to listen. Pleasure is the law.
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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.
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The trouble with the opera is there's always to much singing.
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[on Richard Wagner] A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.
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The music I desire must be supple enough to adapt itself to the lyrical effusions of the soul and the fantasy of dreams.
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Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear.
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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.
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I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.
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To complete a work is just like being present at the death of someone you love.
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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.
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Anyone who calls my music "impressionist" is an imbecile.
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Life is the space between our things.
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I have a horror of sentimentality, and I cannot forget that its name is Saint-Saëns.
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First of all, ladies and gentlemen, you must forget that you are singers.
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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!
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The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.
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The age of automobiles and aeroplanes cannot express itself in the same manner as did the age of the diligence.
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How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling.
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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.
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People don't very much like things that are beautiful - they are so far from their nasty little minds.
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The century of aeroplanes deserves its own music. As there are no precedents, I must create anew.
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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.
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The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.
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Beauty seems to strike some people as a personal affront.
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Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.
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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.
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The sound of the sea, the curve of a horizon, wind in leaves, the cry of a bird leave manifold impression in us. And suddenly, without our wishing it at all, one of these memories spills from us and finds expression in musical language...I want to sing my interior landscape with the simple artlessness of a child.
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Works of art make rules but rules do not make works of art.
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If I am not making music, I have no reason for existing.
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Music is the space between the notes.
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