5 Quotes by Jan Swafford

One of the innate dilemmas of biography is that life is not much like a book. It rarely contains a clearly stated thesis, coherently developed. Life sprawls, stumbles, advances, retreats, gropes for the light switch, and once in a while makes intuitive leaps whose import is barely understood until later, if ever, by the leaper. Life seems to me an improvisation.

What elevates one and not another to the level of genius is not only talent and ambition and luck, but a gift for turning everything to the purpose. ... Perhaps that is a common element in the story of genius: beyond talent and ambition and luck, in some degree you have to be forcibly booted out of everyday life and everyday goals. In any case, it was like that with Brahms. The fulfillment of love was denied him so that other things might take wing.

The situation is desperate,” runs an old Viennese saying, “but not serious.

There’s something singularly moving about that moment when this man – deaf and sick and misanthropic and self-torturing, at the same time one of the most extraordinary and boundlessly generous men our species has produced – greets us person to person, with glass raised, and hails us as friends.

Art is free,” he said, “and is not to be diminished by any chains of craftsmanship.