Glenn Gould Quotes

I see it as my job to try to keep Bach in the mainstream and present his music with, rather than without, its emotional core.

Mozart, Beethoven - how can you not want to share them with everyone and anyone? This stuff is of as great importance as the food we eat and the air we breathe.

It's an extraordinary thing about Mozart is that you never tire of him... he never bores me, and he doesn't... not only bore me, that's too strong a word.

Certain things in Mozart will and can never be excelled.

Just as surely as every new language mastered opens up a new world, so knowledge of a Beethoven, a Chopin, or a Schumann opens up a new world in spiritual beauty and thought.

I think you can move to everything, but with some music you just want to sit still. Like Claude Debussy - I couldn't dance to that.

I haven't heard anything so great for a long time; Beethoven snaps his fingers at the whole world.

I think music moves me more than other people. I can hear a song and it can bring me to tears. It doesn't happen the whole time, but I find songwriting - songs - very, very moving. I always have and I don't think it's fading.

Does it not seem as if Mozart's works become fresher and fresher the oftener we hear them?

I'm a nut for Bach as a composer.

I want to explore humanity and human kind. I think that what's common for all of the things that I've done and all the things that I want to do is that they are all connected to some deeper things in our souls.

Enjoy music. Not the kind that rocks and rolls, but the music of the masters, the music that has lived through the centuries, the music that has lifted people. If you do not have a taste for it, listen to it thoughtfully. If you do not like it the first time, listen to it again and keep listening.

Music has always moved me really deeply, and it's always been more about that than about the desire to rebel or annoy people (although, I've had my moments of that as well). I think it was just years of maybe moving slightly away from it but always coming back to it as the thing that I'm best at.

I don't think I”m a very good actor. Everything is very tentative and at a certain point you click in and just feel the spirit move you. I can be possessed really well.

The actors that I do know are people who I think have souls, you know?

Spirituality is a boundless ability to respond and experience.

I think people when they think of comedic actors they forget that they are people with a point of view and experiences and depth.

Mozart starved, but you allow Thalberg and Liszt make tons of gold: Of course, you may think that someone immortal cannot die of hunger

I don't think meeting people that I've done pictures of spoils it at all because I like the really human sides of people. To meet them and see that they're complicated and weird or shy or any of those things sort of makes it even better - to know that they can rise above that and make something great.

These days movies are cut very quickly and sort of fragmented and I tend to do slower moving stories where people develop relationships with people. I think I'd probably do a lot better if I lived in Europe - I think it's more of a European sensibility somehow.

What makes us human is not our mind but our heart, not our ability to think but our ability to love.

Those are terrible people who don't like Glenn Gould... I will have nothing to do with such people, they are dangerous people.

I finally figured out that I’m solitary by nature, but at the same time I know so many people; so many people think they own a piece of me. They shift and move under my skin, like a parade of memories that simply won’t go away. It doesn’t matter where I am, or how alone--I always have such a crowded head.

You do not know the first note of the music that moves me.