The music is something outside myself that’s also inside myself… Music and a sense of another presence always went hand in hand. Even when I was three, I would improvise music, and my maternal grandfather would act as an audience and used to applaud. I would imitate things like thunder and rain. John Tavener Read Quote
I think I’ve been very lucky all my life because the writing and the faith seem to go together. John Tavener Read Quote
I think there will always be a possibility that God doesn’t exist because He is infinitude and into that infinitude must come that possibility. John Tavener Read Quote
The path I follow is still an Orthodox path. You have to follow a path; otherwise, it becomes a little bit new-age, a bit of this, a bit of that. John Tavener Read Quote
I was having these terrible back pains, and then one day in Switzerland, things got very bad. My wife Maryanna called the hotel doctor, but I don’t remember any of this, I was out of it. I had an operation, and I was nearly lost. John Tavener Read Quote
Every woman I have known has actually deepened my spiritual awareness. Even if I have been a selfish man and treated them badly… There were two women, I won’t name them, who had a powerful religious effect on me. The ancient idea of a muse is there. John Tavener Read Quote
I don’t think Beethoven expresses religious truth. He expresses a human truth. John Tavener Read Quote
