Top 28 Fugue Quotes & Sayings

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,make of our lives a study, as if learning natural historyor music, that we should beginwith the simple exercises firstand slowly go on tryingthe hard ones, practicing till strengthand accuracy became one with the daringto leap into transcendence, take the chance of breaking down in the wild arpeggioor faulting the full sentence of the fugue.

I can find something between sight and hearing and I can produce a fugue in colors as Bach has done in music.

It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility.

In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and it is this: 'Is there someone new?'

There is nothing like a Bach fugue to remove me from a discordant moment... only Bach hold up fresh and strong after repeated playing. I can always return to Bach when the other records weary me.

What I so like about Poussin and Cezanne is their sense of organization. Ilike the way in which they develop space and shape in architecturalcontinuity - the rhythm across their paintings. When I paint a landscape, Iget the greatest pleasure out of composing it. As I paint, I try to work outa visual sonata form or a fugue, with realistic images.

A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed. Any prelude or fugue of Bach can be played at any tempo, with or without rhythmic nuances, and it will still be great music. That's how music should be written, so that no-one, no matter how philistine, can ruin it.

The history of knowledge is a great fugue in which the voices of the nations one after the other emerge.

There is no kind of music I don't listen to. Everything good is interesting. I am as happy with a Bach fugue as I am with a record by Thelonious Monk.

In my own life I studied music, not creative writing; I see a novel as music - an opening as an overture, themes and subplots as lines in a fugue. The chance to write a novel about a musician boxed in by all kinds of limitations but who plays out his ultimate struggle for freedom at the piano was irresistible.

my love of water ... is mingled with and almost indistinguishable from a fear of water (I can float in a vertical position - I enter a fugue state - but I cannot bear to bury my face in water).

The worst constructed play is a Bach fugue when compared to life.

Vain Art of the Fugue was the only one of my novels to be met with relative public recognition: it was nominated for the Prix Médicis by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Milan Kundera pocketed the prize instead and the public never clamored to buy it.

It is folly alone that stays the fugue of Youth and beats off touring Old Age.

In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and it is this: Is there someone new?

The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue.

Who rant by note, and through the gamut rage; in songs and airs express their martial fire; combat in trills, and in a fugue expire.

The Besicovitch style is architectural. He builds out of simply elements a delicate and complicated architectural structure, usually with a hierarchical plan, and then, when the building is finished, the completed structure leads by simple arguments to an unexpected conclusion. Every Besicovitch proof is a work of art, as carefully constructed as a Bach fugue.

And I believe that the Binomial Theorem and a Bach Fugue are, in the long run, more important than all the battles of history.

But music doesn't sum up my approach to literature - even in Vain Art of the Fugue. To 'fugue' I had to invent 'trap-words,' or words that would force the narrator to turn around and start his path anew.

I want Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D played at my funeral. If it isn't I shall jolly well want to know why.

The final, unfinished fugue from The Art of Fugue is the greatest piece of music ever composed.

One really ought to be afraid of self-torture. But it tempted me. It begged. The dark place that my mind was fast becoming blends, in my memory, with the dark womb of church: the chant, the fugue of prayer, the strange erotic energy that carving a very small cross into my thigh with a nail had brought.

Listen to the triple fugue in 'Magnificat' - the first subject is seven voices, the second one has 52 different voices, the third uses five; then I combine all together. Such textures you cannot call primitive.

I enjoy practicing law too much to even contemplate retiring, but I often think about engaging in serious study of the history of art, of the intricacies of classical music. I could write a fugue, or perhaps learn to play the cello.

Economic man and the Calvinist Christian sing to each other like voices in a fugue. The Calvinist stands alone before an almost merciless God; no human agency can help him; his church is a means to political and social organization rather than a bridge to deity, for no priest can have greater knowledge of the divine way than he himself; no friend can console him - in fact, he should distrust all men; in the same fashion, Economic Man faces a merciless world alone and unaided, his hand against every other's.

The blues are like the fugue in 18th century. It's probably the music that belongs most to our time.

My first book published in France was translated and titled Exercices d'Attente in 1972. It was a collection of short works written and published in Romania. In 1973 I was ready to publish the novel Arpièges, which I had started writing in Romanian and of which I had published some fragments under the title Vain Art of the Fugue. Some years later, I finished Necessary Marriage.