Philip Glass Quotes

Traditions are imploding and exploding everywhere - everything is coming together, for better or worse, and we can no longer pretend we're all living in different worlds because we're on different continents.

— Philip Glass

“What came to me as a revelation was the use of rhythm in developing an overall structure in music.”

— Philip Glass

I travel the world, and I'm happy to say that America is still the great melting pot - maybe a chunky stew rather than a melting pot at this point, but you know what I mean.

— Philip Glass

“The problem with listening, of course, is that we don't. There's too much noise going on in our heads, so we never hear anything. The inner conversation simply never stops. It can be our voice or whatever voices we want to supply, but it's a constant racket. In the same way we don't see, and in the same way we don't feel, we don't touch, we don't taste.”

— Philip Glass

“You practice and you get better. It's very simple.”

— Philip Glass

“I don't know what I'm doing and it's the not knowing that makes it interesting.”

— Philip Glass

“A new language requires a new technique. If what you're saying doesn't require a new language, then what you're saying probably isn't new.”

— Philip Glass

“You get up early in the morning and you work all day. That's the only secret.”

— Philip Glass

“What you hear depends on how you focus your ear. We're not talking about inventing a new language, but rather inventing new perceptions of existing languages.”

— Philip Glass

“What I've noticed is that people who love what they do, regardless of what that might be, tend to live longer.”

— Philip Glass

“If you remember your lineage, you will never feel lonely.”

— Philip Glass

I'm interested in what happens to music when other people use it. Whereas there are composers who don't like anyone to touch their music, I think people should because they do things I can't think of.

— Philip Glass

“If you don't have a basis on which to make the choice, then you don't have a style at all. You have a series of accidents.”

— Philip Glass

My biggest problem about writing is whenever I write piano pieces, because I then have to learn to play them, which is sometimes not so easy.

— Philip Glass

“I've been called a minimalist composer for more than 30 years, and while I've never really agreed with the description, I've gotten used to it.”

— Philip Glass

“I consider the first 20 performances just learning the piece. Think about it this way: If you think about a pianist who plays a Schubert sonata through his whole lifetime - if you listen to Rubenstein or Horowitz playing their repertoire later in their life, you understand the richness with which they play that music, and how differently they must have played it when they were younger.”

— Philip Glass

“I always knew what I wanted to do and I did it.”

— Philip Glass

“But the difference between the little pieces and the big pieces - I'm not actually sure which are the little pieces. With some of the big pieces, it's a lot of musical running around, whereas the little pieces, you can say everything you want to say.”

— Philip Glass

“The work I've done is the work I know, and the work I do is the work I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing.”

— Philip Glass

“In order to arrive at a personal style, you have to have a technique to begin with.”

— Philip Glass

“I shift between mediums very frequently. Instead of taking a break from writing, I just write in a different medium or in a different way or for a different purpose, so that I don't actually stop writing - I just go to something else. Like going from a big symphony to a piano piece is great and very refreshing, I find. And then going from that to a big concerto, and then having to go out and play.”

— Philip Glass

It doesn't need to be imagined, it needs to be written down.

— Philip Glass

“I don't know that I make a big distinction between the big pieces and the little pieces, because I don't experience them in that way. I mean, by the same token, you're out touring with a band and then you're writing string quartets, and in a funny way, isn't it all the same, in a way? It's all just music.”

— Philip Glass

“The hardest thing about traveling is that mostly you get to a point - and it always happens on every tour - where you can choose between eating and sleeping, but you can't do both.”

— Philip Glass

“So the real drama for me is balancing live performances and writing, and one of the ways I balance it is I write in hotel rooms. That's not exactly balancing. Actually, writing in hotel rooms means that I'm refusing to deal with the problem.”

— Philip Glass

“I think it's a great handicap to be discovered at an early age. I didn't have that burden of early success. I had the much more livable and durable career where success comes late, and comes slowly, and you ease into it. So by the time it comes, you're ready to deal with it.”

— Philip Glass