Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
One of the most difficult things in opera is for people to suspend disbelief.
The function of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought.
I don't think an opera house is ever a place that can make you entirely happy.
And I always tried to be not a star. To be someone who people like to talk to.
I'm not particularly lucid after a concert. I'm not very lucid before, either.
There are some sounds that English singers find quite difficult to manipulate.
The bagpipes sound exactly the same when you have finished as when you started
Citizens of India, Pakistan, and Kashmir need to come together and make music.
When you make a mistake, throw your hands in the air and say "How fascinating!"
I always had, deep down, a slight aversion toward the purely cerebral in music.
With an orchestra you are building citizens, better citizens for the community.
I use my hands like a sculptor, to mold and shape the sound I want, to clarify.
We have to be evangelists for music. We couldn't just be high priests of music.
Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away.
Elgar's first symphony is the musical equivalent of St Pancras Railway Station.
I have just been all round the world and have formed a very poor opinion of it.
I've learned a lot from the masters of orchestration, like Ravel and Stravinsky.
From Toscanini I learnt the essential and desperate seriousness of making music.
After 30 years I have realized the greatest pleasure I can get is to have learnt.
Between the two men, somewhere, a truth is lying, and that is what I try to find.
If you don't know what to do, find your worst Piece and look for a better Square.
If the (British) Arts Council give you money, they also tell you how to spend it.
Beethoven was always too much. He's not slightly anything - he's very everything.
Music has just as much to do with movement and body as it does soul and intellect.
Los Angeles is a very special city. It's a great ethnic mix, a great cultural mix.
Extreme volume in music very often disguises a lack of actually important content.
Without him here, it is impossible to know how fast he will play it, approximately.
The only time you realize you have a reputation is when you're not living up to it.
A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.
My temples are only in India. When I am in India, I go to the religious ceremonies.
Compassion is the litmus test and culminating touchstone of a spirituality of Earth.
The conductor's stand is not a continent of power, but rather an island of solitude.
They are quite hopeless - drooling, driveling, doleful, depressing, dropsical drips.
After conducting Wagner, Beethoven's triple concerto is like taking an Alka Seltzer.
If you want to please the critics, don't play too loud, too soft, too fast, too slow.
To Strauss the composer I take off my hat; to Strauss the man I put it back on again.
Classical music has become rarefied, like a maiden aunt that nobody wants to talk to.
Journalism is about covering important stories-with a pillow, until they stop moving.
My music wouldn't sound the way it does if I hadn't had the experience of conducting.
I realized that the European dogma is not necessarily the only way to look at things.
If you're alive, you have all the experience necessary to understand classical music.
The Congressman ascertained that the consulate in Havana had numbers to feed the pigs.
Employee fathers need to step up to the plate and put their family needs on the table.
My hunch is that probably men are doing more both outside the home and inside the home
I'll know I'm reaching the total American market when I'm asked to do a video for MTV.
Don't you think it astonishing that, at 58, I am still working at improving my career?
The better the orchestra, often the harder it is to conduct, not the other way around.
The sound of a harpsichord - two skeletons copulating on a tin roof in a thunderstorm.
The sound of the harpsichord resembles that of a bird-cage played with toasting-forks.
I just want to play for Hindus and Muslims that sit together. That's all I want to do.