62 Quotes by Glenn Gould

I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the music of any one composer during all that time, that composer would almost certainly be Bach.

The G-minor Symphony consists of eight remarkable measures surrounded by a half-hour of banality.

One does not play the piano with one’s fingers, one plays the piano with one’s mind.

I believe that the only excuse we have for being musicians and for making music in any fashion, is to make it differently, to perform it differently, to establish the music’s difference, vis-a-vis our own difference.

If an artist wants to use his mind for creative work, cutting oneself off from society is a necessary thing.

I don’t approve of people who watch television, but I am one of them.

In the best of all possible worlds, art would be unnecessary. Its offer of restorative, placative therapy would go begging a patient. The professional specialization involved in its making would be presumption. The generalities of its applicability would be an affront. The audience would be the artist and their life would be art.

I’ve always had a sort of intuition that for every hour you spend with other human beings you need x number of hours alone. Now, what that x represents I don’t really know, whether it be two and seven-eights or seven and two-eights, but it’s a substantial ratio.

I detest audiences – not in their individual components, but en masse I detest audiences. I think they’re a force of evil. It seems to me rule of mob law.