Michael Tippett Quotes

Shiva danced the world into existence... that's a very nice thought.

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

Music remains the most strange of the materials because we don't understand what happens when music moves you.

Music is a performance and needs the audience.

The nearest figure to myself would be Shakespeare.

Nature has different times.

Shakespeare fascinated me. He hardly ever left the country. His imagination was worldwide though reading.

Public notice does not necessarily accord with internal fulfilment.

When we use terms we get confused, yet we have no other way.

Beethoven suppressed everything, his personal life disappeared until he was locked inside. That is a figure quite extreme.

Characters are an extreme form in Shakespeare's theater.

Conductors don't suffer, they are part of the performance.

Music is a performing art, as any Native American will tell you. It isn't there in the score.

I think we're all pretty odd.

The Greek sculptor - I don't think he was very different from any of us.

I've seldom become nostalgic or settled.

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

I remain a humanist. We are a very curious race.

I'm outside the music I've made. I have no interest in it.