John Banville Quotes

All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it.

Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school? Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical? What if the ones inside can't hear very well, would that change my question?

If sound is music and came from silence, then silence is potentially greater than sound. If the sound is effective, it should actually have a chemical - some sort of physiological - effect on the listener, so he doesn't have to hear that sound again.

There's no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound.

If there's loads of material going by you don't notice the individual things quite so much. Also it really foregrounds the sonic dimensions like electronic ambient music, it's pushes all of that colour to the foreground so you hear little every atom of sound.

People who understand music hear sounds that no one else makes when Frank Sinatra sings.

I saw a tree fall in the woods, and I didn't hear it.

Blind people come to the park just to hear him pitch.

Everybody has their taste in noises as well as in other matters; and sounds are quite innoxious, or most distressing, by their sort rather than their quantity.

Whether I make them or not, there are always sounds to be heard and all of them are excellent.

A person does not hear sound only through the ears; he hears sound through every pore of his body. It permeates the entire being.

When a man is not disposed to hear music, there is not a more disagreeable sound in harmony than that of the violin.

However minutely labored the picture may be in the detail, the whole will have a false and even an unfinished appearance, at whatever distance, or in whatever light it can be shown.

The way we look at it, everything is a sound.

It took me a long time to realize that distance can ruin even the best of intentions.

It is the invariable lesson to humanity that distance in time, and in space as well, lends focus. It is not recorded, incidentally, that the lesson has ever been permanently learned.

If you don't have the possibility of listening to music, you can't know if you love it.

Music is sound. It's a wave. It's going out and coming back, and it's bouncing off.

To me, an untrained ear, a young person at the time, I would hear off the different feels, all these different sounds, and then years later realize that everyone had used the same equipment, just to their own ends.

When I am willing, all sound is available to me.

A lot of inspiration comes from the sounds that we are attracted to when we come across them in our experiments and may lead us into a certain direction because of inherent possibilities we hear in them.

Lik the tree falling in the forest," says Ira. "Huh?" "You know, the old question - if a tree falls in a forest and no one's there to hear it, does it really make a sound?" Howie considers this. "Is it a pine forest, or oak?" "What's the difference?" "Oak is a much denser wood; it's more likely to be heard by someone on the freeway next to the forest where no one is.

My favorite piece [piece of music] is the one we hear all the time if we are quiet.

With digital sound just becomes simply information, not the sum of its parts.

Poetry is music, and nothing but music. Words with musical emphasis.