65 Quotes by 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you don’t know what to do, there’s actually a chance of doing something new. As long as you know what you’re doing, nothing much of interest is going to happen.

Openings and closings, beginnings and endings. Everything in between passes as quickly as the blink of an eye. An eternity precedes the opening and another, if not the same, follows the closing. Somehow everything that lies in between seems for a moment more vivid. What is real to us becomes forgotten, and what we don’t understand will be forgotten, too.

The past is reinvented and becomes the future. But the lineage is everything.

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