Browsing Topic Best Fugue Quotes

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

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).

If you want to be considered a poet, you will have to show mastery of the petrarchan sonnet form or the sestina. Your musical efforts must begin with well-formed fugues. There is no substitute for craft… Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered.

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

The idea of safety had shrunk into particles – one snug moment, then the next. Meanwhile, the brain piped fugues of worry and staged mind-theaters full of tragedies and triumphs, because unfortunately, the fear of death does wonders to focus the mind, inspire creativity, and heightens the senses. Trusting one’s hunches only seems gamble if one has time for seem; otherwise the brain goes on autopilot and trades the elite craft of analysis for the best rapid insights that float up from its danger files and ancient bag of tricks.

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.

What I like to do is treat words as a craftsman does his wood or stone or what-have-you, to hew, carve, mold, coil, polish, and plane them into patterns, sequences, sculptures, fugues of sound expressing some lyrical impulse, some spiritual doubt or conviction, some dimly realized truth I must try to reach and realize.

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.

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.

The prophesying business is like writing fugues; it is fatal to every one save the man of absolute genius.

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

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 a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

If you try to have a fashion show with Bach fugues and John Coltrane, it doesn’t really work.

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