A biography for Glenn Gouldhasn’t been written yet.
“Until I was about 13, somehow I managed to assume that everyone reacted to everything just about as I did. I took it for granted that everyone shared my passion for overcast skies. It came as quite a shock when I discovered that there were actually people who preferred sunshine.”
“I'm fascinated with what happens to the creative output when you isolate yourself from the approval and disapproval of the people around you.”
“When I broke 20, I said to myself, 'I will give concerts until I'm approximately 30.' And I made it a year and a half late, but, nevertheless, that's what I did. When I broke 30, I said, 'I think I should be recording until I'm about 50.'”
“Behind every silver lining, there's a cloud.”
“Concert pianists are really afraid to try out the Beethoven Fourth Concerto if the Third happens to be their specialty. That's the piece they had such success with on Long Island, by George, and it will surely bring them success in Connecticut. So first there's tremendous conservatism. And then stagnation sets in. Or it certainly did in me.”
“By the time I was six, I made an important discovery that I get along much better with animals than humans.”
“I don't think any of the early Romantic composers knew how to write for the piano... The music of that era is full of empty theatrical gestures, full of exhibitionism, and it has a worldly, hedonistic quality that simply turns me off.”
“I think there's a fallacy that's been concocted by the music teachers' profession, to wit: that there's a certain sequence of events necessary in order to have the revealed truth about the way one produces a given effect on a given instrument.”
“I detest audiences. Not in their individual components but en masse... I think they are a force of evil.”
“I detest audiences - not in their individual components, but en masse I detest audiences. I think they're a force of evil. It seems to me rule of mob law.”
“There's a very curious and - and almost sadistic lust for blood that overcomes the concert listener, and there's a waiting for it to happen: a waiting for the horn to fluff; a waiting for the strings to become ragged; a waiting for the conductor to forget the subdivide, you know? And it's dreadful!”
“Chopin, Schubert, and Liszt had no idea of how to write for the piano.”
“I could read music before I could read.”
“I treat recorded tapes the way a film director treats his rushes.”
“The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.”
“Isolation is the one sure way to human happiness.”
“It's true that I've driven through a number of red lights on occasion, but on the other hand, I've stopped at a lot of green ones but never gotten credit for it.”
“To me, the ideal artist-to-audience relationship is a one-to-zero relationship. The artist should be granted anonymity.”
“I love the early sonatas; I love the early Mozart, period. I'm really fond of that moment when he was either emulating Haydn or Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach or anybody but himself. The moment he found himself, as conventional wisdom would have it, at the age of 18 or 19 or 20, I stop being so interested in him.”