Maurice Ravel Quotes

Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second.

The only love affair I have ever had was with music.

I did my work slowly, drop by drop. I tore it out of me by pieces.

We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art

I do not ask for my music to be interpreted, but only for it to be played.

I begin by considering an effect.

Tell me that not everything I wrote was bad.

Why become a second-rate Ravel when you're already a first-rate Gershwin?

Does it not occur to people that I might be artificial by nature?

Remember that I wrote a pavane for a dead princess, and not a dead pavane for a princess!

For Debussy the musician and the man I have had profound admiration, but by nature I'm different from him. I think I have always personally followed a direction opposed to that of the symbolism of Debussy.

In fact, the influence of Schoenberg may be overwhelming on his followers, but the significance of his art is to be identified with influences of a more subtle kind - not the system, but the aesthetic, of his art. I am quite conscious of the fact that my Chansons madécasses are in no way Schoenbergian, but I do not know whether I ever should have been able to write them had Schoenberg never written.

To George Gershwin, on refusinghim as a pupil: You would only lose the spontaneous quality of your melody, and end by writing bad Ravel.

My intention here is to make it clear that not a single cell of my composition, here in regard to The Raven, is found by chance or intuition, that the composition moved towards perfection with the precision and inevitability of a mathematical equation.

If he'd been making shell-cases during the war it might have been better for music.

I am not one of the great composers. All the great have produced enormously. There is everything in their work - the best and the worst, but there is always quantity. But I have written relatively little.

You might lose your spontaneity and, instead of composing first-rate Gershwin, end up with second rate Ravel.