You can't expect someone born into a family with no music...to understand when I'm conducting the Schönberg Variations.

Music has the capacity to create a greater reality.

The French Revolution gave us three... powerful ideas, or concepts - liberty, equality and fraternity. But these ideas... are not only right in themselves, but they are so because they come in the proper order. You cannot have equality without liberty, and you certainly cannot have fraternity without equality. The importance of this I learnt from music, because music evolves in time, and therefore the order inevitably determines the content.

And in English you have this wonderful difference between listening and hearing, and that you can hear without listening, and you can listen and not hear.

I love conducting. What I'm tired of is music administration. I don't want that. I just want to make music.

An hour of violin lessons in Berlin is an hour where you get the child interested in music. An hour in a violin lesson in Palestine is an hour away from violence, is an hour away from fundamentalism.

In the long term, Israel's security rests on only one pillar: the Palestinians' acceptance of the country. It isn't the atom bomb that makes Israel secure.