A Quote by Jeffrey Tate

The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet.

Jeffrey Tate

Quote Topics

Behavior Expression Human Human Behavior Most Perfect Quartet String String Quartet

Quote Author

Jeffrey Tate
English - Musician
Born: April 28, 1943

I much rather coach a string quartet in an interpretation of Haydn or Beethoven than to teach the guitar.

Julian Bream

How could a New Yorker possibly take something called the Hollywood String Quartet seriously?

Leonard Slatkin

I would like to hear Elliot Carter's Fourth String Quartet, if only to discover what a cranky prostate does to one's polyphony.

James Sellars

I approach everything as chamber music. Even with Beethoven symphonies, I lead from the violin and basically encourage the orchestra to think of it as a giant string quartet.

Joshua Bell

The Detroit String Quartet played Brahms last night. Brahms lost.

Bennett Cerf

A world without tomatoes is like a string quartet without violins.

Laurie Colwin

Reading to kids is to ordinary reading what jazz is to a string quartet.

Sean Wilentz

A noble space, unlike any other of our time, for it is both strong and delicate. It seems to call at once for a Boeing 747 and for a string quartet.

Paul Goldberger

When I'm scoring something like a string quartet, it's all notated music, so it's meticulously written in the score, which is very different than doing things by ear.

Bryce Dessner

History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right - how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed.

Amy Waldman

I think the underlying purpose is expression. It's not about technique, it's not about hitting the right note, writing the perfect prose, having the perfect brushstroke. It's about expression of oneself, the things around you, and the emotions. I think expression is the one word that I would use, whether it's for sorrow, tragedy, joy, or even the need to express and be heard.

Charlie Albright

Art arises in those strange complexities of action that are called human beings. It is a kind of human behavior. As such it is not magic, except as human beings are magical. Nor is it concerned in absolutes, eternities, "forms," beyond those that may reside in the context of the human being and be subject to his vicissitudes. Art is not an inner state of consciousness, whatever that may mean. Neither is it essentially a supreme form of communication. Art is human behavior, and its values are contained in human behavior.

Baker Brownell

I suppose subconsciously I was thinking in terms of having the scale of it matching the scale of the images. Hence the sort of string quartet, jazz band and electronic stuff.

Jonny Greenwood

So powerful, in fact, is simple string in taming the world to human will and ingenuity that I suspect it to be the unseen weapon that allowed the human race to conquer the earth, that enabled us to move out into every econiche on the globe during the Upper Palaeolithic. We could call it the String Revolution.