Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Perfection is not very communicative
Music has always been transnational.
Nobody else can make the sound you make.
Good things happen when you meet strangers.
Sharing is a much better way to communicate than proving.
One of the things I love about music is live performance.
We may be coming to a new golden age of instrument making.
I think that peace is, in many ways, a precondition of joy.
After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is.
When your heart and your mind are engaged, you cannot go wrong.
I realized late in life that my twin passions are music and people.
I think anybody who goes away finds you appreciate home more when you return.
People will ask, 'Are you famous?' And I always answer, 'My mother thinks so.'
My involvement in the political arena is to make sure there's a place for culture.
When we enlarge our view of the world, we deepen our understanding of our own lives.
Music is one of the ways we can achieve a kind of shorthand to understand each other.
I think one of the great things about being a musician is that you never stop learning.
Culture opens our hearts to one another. And the currency in culture is not money, but trust.
There's a part of me that's always charging ahead. I'm the curious kid, always going to the edge.
Our cultural strength has always been derived from our diversity of understanding and experience.
Music is powered by ideas. If you don't have clarity of ideas, you're just communicating sheer sound.
I remember when I was growing up. My great wish was to understand who I was and how I fit in the world.
I have yet to find something that beats the power of being in love, or the power of music at its most magical.
When we have a good balance between thinking and feeling... our actions and lives are always the richer for it.
You go through phases. You have to reinvent reasons for playing, and one year's answer might not do for another.
The tango is really a combination of many cultures, though it eventually became the national music of Argentina.
Once something is memorable, it's living and you're using it. That to me is the foundation of a creative society.
Bach takes you to a very quiet place within yourself, to the inner core, a place where you are calm and at peace.
You must have a reason to be in the places to which you go, and you must do only things that you really care about.
I don't always have a five-year plan. One thing you must do in life is keep your learning curve as high as possible.
As a musician I'm kind of nomadic, Waldo-like. I show up in different places, and I'm witness to unbelievable things.
With every year of playing, you want to relax one more muscle. Why? Because the more tense you are, the less you can hear.
Each day I move toward that which I do not understand. The result is a continuous accidental learning which constantly shapes my life.
Passion is one great force that unleashes creativity, because if you're passionate about something, then you're more willing to take risks.
Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.
When people ask me how they should approach performance, I always tell them the professional musician should aspire to the state of the beginner.
When you learn something from people, or from a culture, you accept it as a gift, and it is your lifelong commitment to preserve it and build on it.
Classical music is one of the best things that ever happened to mankind. If you get introduced to it in the right way, it becomes your friend for life.
One of the marks of a great teacher lies not only in an ability to impart knowledge but also in knowing when to encourage a student to go off on his own.
You know, you can have someone who's the very best at something, but if there's not that kind of chemistry, collaborating is not going to amount to anything.
Many of the Central Asians know Russian, and Ted Levin speaks it fluently. I speak Chinese, but Mongolian is completely different, so we had to have translators.
Music has always been transnational; people pick up whatever interests them, and certainly a lot of classical music has absorbed influences from all over the world.
I want to investigate different cultures, to see how their identities and values affect their music. It's one way I can get to know our world, at least to a certain depth.
Mastering music is more than learning technical skills. Practicing is about quality, not quantity. Some days I practice for hours; other days it will be just a few minutes.
I think of a piece of music as something that comes alive when it is being performed, and I feel that my role in the transmission of music is to be its best advocate at that moment.
The worst thing you can do is say to yourself, "I want to be just like somebody else." You have to absorb knowledge from someone else, but ultimately you have to find your own voice.
This middle age thing is a little weird. Some friends and mentors are gone, and there's a very forward-looking new generation coming up behind me. So it's very much finding my own place.
Children, in a way, are constant learners. Certainly sponge-like. Absorbing everything without careful analysis, even though, at the same time, they are certainly capable of incredible insights.
I learn something not because I have to, but because I really want to. That's the same view I have for performing. I'm performing because I really want to, not because I have to bring bread back home.
A composition is always more than the sum of its parts. In other words, a really good piece of music is more than itself. It's sort of like a prism, which you can see from each facet a single totality.