Top 43 Quotes & Sayings by Philip Glass

Traditions are imploding and exploding everywhere - everything is coming together, for better or worse, and we can no longer pretend we're all living in different worlds because we're on different continents.

I travel the world, and I'm happy to say that America is still the great melting pot - maybe a chunky stew rather than a melting pot at this point, but you know what I mean.

What came to me as a revelation was the use of rhythm in developing an overall structure in music.

What I've noticed is that people who love what they do, regardless of what that might be, tend to live longer.

If you don't have a basis on which to make the choice, then you don't have a style at all. You have a series of accidents.

I don't think I'm capable of making radical changes, but over a period of four or five years you can perceive very big changes, and they seem rather small at the time.

My biggest problem about writing is whenever I write piano pieces, because I then have to learn to play them, which is sometimes not so easy.

You practice and you get better. It's very simple.

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.

So the real drama for me is balancing live performances and writing, and one of the ways I balance it is I write in hotel rooms. That's not exactly balancing. Actually, writing in hotel rooms means that I'm refusing to deal with the problem.

I, as a young guy getting out of music school, I didn't like the prospect of spending my life writing music for about 200 people.

Finally, ultimately, you write music for yourself. I mean, I need a public, I need people to play, I need everything else. I'm not working in isolation. But finally the man that writes the music is alone. And I have to respond to those criteria which are almost like inner needs or inner responses.

I always knew what I wanted to do and I did it.

I don't know what I'm doing and it's the not knowing that makes it interesting.

I've been called a minimalist composer for more than 30 years, and while I've never really agreed with the description, I've gotten used to it.

The problem with listening, of course, is that we don't. There's too much noise going on in our heads, so we never hear anything. The inner conversation simply never stops. It can be our voice or whatever voices we want to supply, but it's a constant racket. In the same way we don't see, and in the same way we don't feel, we don't touch, we don't taste.

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

I don't know that I make a big distinction between the big pieces and the little pieces, because I don't experience them in that way. I mean, by the same token, you're out touring with a band and then you're writing string quartets, and in a funny way, isn't it all the same, in a way? It's all just music.

There's almost no content in terms of language at all. I don't like using language to convey meaning. I'd rather use images and music.

I find that people can’t find you. It’s kind of quiet. When I go to a city, I can almost always get a piano if I need one. So there’s something nice about being on the road and focusing on something you want to do.

I'd say it's just part of the world that we live in; it's part of the music world.

A new language requires a new technique. If what you're saying doesn't require a new language, then what you're saying probably isn't new.

Traditions are imploding and exploding everywhere - everything is coming together, for better or worse, and we can no longer pretend were all living in different worlds because were on different continents.

You get up early in the morning and you work all day. That’s the only secret.

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 consider the first 20 performances just learning the piece. Think about it this way: If you think about a pianist who plays a Schubert sonata through his whole lifetime - if you listen to Rubenstein or Horowitz playing their repertoire later in their life, you understand the richness with which they play that music, and how differently they must have played it when they were younger.

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.

Theatrical times are different from concert times, to put it simply. Taking a figure like [Mahatma] Gandhi and setting him on a stage requires thinking about what theater is about and what the whole experience is about and what we're trying to communicate in that way, so you get into certain less abstract considerations.

I shift between mediums very frequently. Instead of taking a break from writing, I just write in a different medium or in a different way or for a different purpose, so that I don't actually stop writing - I just go to something else. Like going from a big symphony to a piano piece is great and very refreshing, I find. And then going from that to a big concerto, and then having to go out and play.

Satyagraha is an opera which I wrote for the Netherlands Opera, so it uses an orchestra of around fifty, a chorus of forty, and there are about seven soloists. The opera ... Satyagraha means truthful, so it was a name [Mahatma] Gandhi used to describe his civil disobedience movement.

Akhnaten is kind of a dark, kind of mysterious character. We don't know a lot about him - a lot of information on him was lost. But he obviously was a kind of iconoclast of him time. I guess I'm attracted to people like that. Like [Albert] Einstein also, who radically changed our way of thinking about the world we live in.

I think I'm really part of a whole generational movement in a way. I think a lot of other people since and during this time have gotten interested in writing what we can still call experimental music. It's not commercial music. And it's really a concert music, but a concert music for our time. And wanting to find the audience, because we've discovered the audience is really there. Those became really clear with Einstein on the Beach.

I like the idea that [Mahatma] Gandhi is appearing now in an opera hall in all these different places, and people kind of think about it again.

I'd say the differences are more interesting than the similarities at this point. Certainly no one would ever mistake my music for Steve's [ Reich].

The generation of composers that are just preceded me, people like [Karlheinz] Stockhausen, [Pierre] Boulez, and, well, [John] Cage for that matter,[Morton] Feldman ... That was a kind of experimental music that was very isolated. It had no real public.

If you remember your lineage, you will never feel lonely.

What you hear depends on how you focus your ear. We're not talking about inventing a new language, but rather inventing new perceptions of existing languages.

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.

In order to arrive at a personal style, you have to have a technique to begin with.

I was a regular kind of academic music student. I was at Juilliard. I had to study all the contemporary music of the time, and changing that language very radically was just a sign or a signal that I was going to try to do something very different. I find that that's what I feel closest to. I found no real inner response in me in a non-tonal language.

It takes about a year to write an opera for me, but not a really a year of writing. I'm touring at the same time, and I'm playing, sometimes doing smaller projects.[The opera] Akhnaten fits in with Gandhi and Einstein, so that forms a trilogy in a way.I picked people who were these kind of larger than life characters, who kind of changed the world they lived in by almost the force of their personality and their inventiveness. People that I think not only do I admire but I think they're admirable people.

I've been working in theater, really, since about 1965. I started working with the Mabou Mines about then, and in a way I've always worked in the theater, but it's never been a main part of my work. And it wasn't until Einstein that I kind of shifted into high gear with theater, working with Bob, with Bob Wilson. And since then I find it a very attractive form to work in. It's just an extension of my work.