Claude Debussy

Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.

The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.

On those who overanalyze his music: When you tear the wings off a butterfly, it is no longer a butterfly

But music, don't you know, is a dream from which the veils have been lifted. It's not even the expression of a feeling, it's the feeling itself.

People come to music to seek oblivion: is that not also a form of deception?

Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear.

Art is the most beautiful deception of all!

Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind.

There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. I love music passionately. And because l love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. It is a free art gushing forth, an open-air art boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea. It must never be shut in and become an academic art.

How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling.

I wish to sing of my interior visions with the naive candour of a child.

Art is the most beautiful deception of all! And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.

Art is the most beautiful of all lies.

The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous will happen.

If we look at the works of JS Bach ... on each page we discover things which we thought were born only yesterday, from delightful arabesques to an overflowing of religious feeling greater than anything we have since discovered.

Beauty must appeal to the senses, must provide us with immediate enjoyment, must impress us or insinuate itself into us without any effort on our part.