Top 35 Philip Glass Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “You practice and you get better. It’s very simple.”

— Philip Glass

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

— Philip Glass

3. “I don’t know what I’m doing and it’s the not knowing that makes it interesting.”

— Philip Glass

4. “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.”

— Philip Glass

5. “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.”

— Philip Glass

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

— Philip Glass

7. “If you don’t know what to do, there’s actually a chance of doing something new. As long as you know what you’re doing, nothing much of interest is going to happen.”

— Philip Glass

8. “One of Allen Ginsberg’s T-shirts said, “Well, while I’m here, I’ll do the work. And what’s the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.”

— Philip Glass

9. “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.”

— Philip Glass

10. “If you remember your lineage, you will never feel lonely.”

— Philip Glass

11. “It doesn’t need to be imagined, it needs to be written down.”

— Philip Glass

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

— Philip Glass

13. “Music was no longer a metaphor for the real world somewhere out there. It was becoming the opposite. The “out there” stuff was the metaphor and the real part was, and is to this day, the music.”

— Philip Glass

14. “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.”

— Philip Glass

15. “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.”

— Philip Glass

16. “If you don’t know what to do, there’s actually a chance of doing something new.”

— Philip Glass

17. “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.”

— Philip Glass

18. “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.”

— Philip Glass

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

— Philip Glass

20. “The people there were obsessed with gold. They were convinced they were going to make a fortune, and some of them did, but they also spent it.”

— Philip Glass

21. “Openings and closings, beginnings and endings. Everything in between passes as quickly as the blink of an eye. An eternity precedes the opening and another, if not the same, follows the closing. Somehow everything that lies in between seems for a moment more vivid. What is real to us becomes forgotten, and what we don’t understand will be forgotten, too.”

— Philip Glass

22. “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.”

— Philip Glass

23. “The past is reinvented and becomes the future. But the lineage is everything.”

— Philip Glass

24. “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.”

— Philip Glass

25. “The point was that the world of music – its language, beauty, and mystery – was already urging itself on me. Some shift had already begun. Music was no longer a metaphor for the real world somewhere out there. It was becoming the opposite. The “out there” stuff was the metaphor and the real part was, and is to this day, the music.”

— Philip Glass

26. “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.”

— Philip Glass

27. “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.”

— Philip Glass

28. “And, between teaching with love and teaching with fear, I have to say the benefit of each is about the same.”

— Philip Glass

29. “Years later, in 1987, I wrote a violin concerto for Ben. I knew he loved the Mendelssohn violin concerto, so I wrote it in a way that he would have liked. In his actual lifetime I didn’t have the knowledge, skill, or inclination to compose such a work. I missed that chance by at least fifteen years. But when I could, I wrote it for him anyway.”

— Philip Glass

30. “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.”

— Philip Glass

31. “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.”

— Philip Glass

32. “At the end of my third year as a full-time student, when I won a $750 prize, I immediately went to a BMW motorcycle shop in the Eighties on the West Side and bought a used BMW R69 500-cc motorcycle, all black and, though used, in great shape.”

— Philip Glass

33. “I always knew what I wanted to do and I did it.”

— Philip Glass

34. “In retrospect, I think those people dressed in costumes walking up Montparnasse must have seen someting before anybody else did. When they looked at me and said, “This guy comes with us,” I think it wasn’t just an accident, it was as clear a sign as I would ever get that I was going to enter the life of the artist. I was going to disrobe myself, I was going to put on a new identity, I was going to be somebody else.”

— Philip Glass

35. “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.”

— Philip Glass

36. “The music that I was playing and writing in those early years, that I was importing to Europe, was quintessentially New York music in a way that I always hoped it would be. I wanted my concert music to be as distinctive as Zappa at the Fillmore East, and I think I ended up doing that.”

— Philip Glass

37. “Truth be told, I was far from horrified by the prospect of “traveling from city to city and living in hotels.” I was rather looking forward eagerly to that – a life filled with music and travel – and completely thrilled with the whole idea.”

— Philip Glass