X

Sort by

Quote length

Sentiment

Change font

Change background

Tag Name "Chopin" (34)

Page 1 of 2
Filter & Style
Image
Chopin was the first piano composer who knew exactly how to make piano sound reach fullness, radiance and grandness. What to regard and what, by all means, to avoid. Chopin was keenly aware of the overtones and he did take care of them so artfully.
Frederic Chopin
Image
Beethoven for listening Liszt, Chopin, and Beethoven for playing as well as Bach and Prokofiev and so on. If I kept going, this list would spiral. It's as wide as literature in fact, it is probably wider.
William Golding
Image
Michael Ondaatje’s work taught me how to be at home in fragments, and how to think about a big story in carefully curated vignettes. All his books were odd, all of them ‘unfinished’ the way Chopin’s Études are unfinished: no wasted gestures, no unnecessary notes.
Amitava Kumar
Image
Sometimes I think, not so much am I a pianist, but a vampire. All my life I have lived off the blood of Chopin.
Arthur Rubinstein
Image
The only work that can be compared to Chopin's Etudes, innovatively, where every note is essential and one becomes completely exposed, is the Brahms-Paganini variations. These are etudes - not as interesting musically as, say, the Brahms-Handel - but they are incredible.
Carlo Grante
Image
I used to play the piano by listening to it - like Chopin pieces, when I was, like, a little kid - and then the minute my parents got me lessons to read music, I couldn't do it anymore.
Eliza Coupe
Image
Hats off, gentlemen - a genius! If the mighty autocrat of the north knew what a dangerous enemy threatened him in Chopin's works in the simple tunes of his mazurkas, he would forbid this music. Chopin's works are canons buried in flowers.
Frederic Chopin
Image
I grew up in Deptford in south London, and at that time I used to wear toppers, loon pants and tonic suits from shops like Take 6 and Topman. I was a bit of a soul boy, but I had a very eclectic taste in music - I was into James Brown and Bowie and I was the only kid in the neighbourhood who would also be listening to Chopin.
Gary Oldman
Image
Trying to capture the physicists' precise mathematical description of the quantum world with our crude words and mental images is like playing Chopin with a boxing glove on one hand and a catcher's mitt on the other.
George Johnson
Image
Just as surely as every new language mastered opens up a new world, so knowledge of a Beethoven, a Chopin, or a Schumann opens up a new world in spiritual beauty and thought.
Ignacy Jan Paderewski
Image
True originality has its foundations in the soul, not in the mind, and when there is an effort to create something different it is usually a failure. Beethoven or Schumann or Chopin did not try to be original. They were original.
Ignacy Jan Paderewski
Image
On Saturday afternoons when all the things are done in the house and there's no real work to be done, I play Bach and Chopin and turn it up real loudly and get a good bottle of chardonnay and sit out on my deck and look out at the garden.
Maya Angelou
Image
I think Bach is equally a romantic composer because he laid the seeds harmonically for people like Chopin and the great Romantics, Brahms, so its difficult to you know all this like labelling and putting - I think Bach is attractive to musicians because he supersedes the labels.
Nigel Kennedy
Image
After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed and mourning over tragedies that were not my own.
Oscar Wilde
Image
A great artist can really enter the logic of any particular mazurka and fully understand the language of Chopin's music.
Rafal Blechacz
Image
It was an unforgettable picture to see Chopin sitting at the piano like a clairvoyant, lost in his dreams to see how his vision communicated itself through his playing, and how, at the end of each piece, he had the sad habit of running one finger over the length of the plaintive keyboard, as though to tear himself forcibly away from his dream.
Robert Schumann
Image
If you think you're going to have an eternity in which you can talk to Mozart and Chopin and Schopenhauer on a cloud and learn stuff and you know really get to grips with knowledge and understanding and so you won't bother now, I think it's a terrible, a terrible mistake.
Stephen Fry
Image
You [Chopin] have in your fingers an orchestra of butterflies.
Adam Mickiewicz
Image
To me, art almost always speaks more forcefully when it appears in an imperfect, accidental, and fragmentary way, somehow just signaling its presence, allowing one to feel it through the ineptitude of the interpretation. I prefer the Chopin that reaches me in the street from an open window to the Chopin served in great style from the concert stage.
Witold Gombrowicz
Image
Descendants of pigeons once fed by Keats, Byron, George Sand, Chopin and many other famous lovers are still being fed, and the sudden sound when they all rise together, frightened away, is like the sound of giant sails flapping.
Anais Nin
Image
I've not been an admirer of contemporary music since punk rock went off the boil in 1977, but once a year I'll listen to 'Spiral Scratch' by the Buzzcocks, or 'Hippy Hippy Shake' by the Swinging Blue Jeans. Otherwise, I can put up with Chopin or shakuhachi flute in the background.
Billy Childish
Image
Talking to Lee Child and discovering, from his chapter in The Chopin Manuscript, that he's even more of an audio geek than I am (as his chapter in Chopin proves).
David Hewson
Image
Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
The music teacher came twice a week to bridge the awful gap between Dorothy and Chopin.
George Ade
Previous
Next