Compromise is a skill, and like all skills it atrophies from lack of use.

Music was literally in the air at the time, the Vienna of 1780. Everybody played music, classical music. There were in fact so many musicians that in apartment buildings people had to come up with a schedule - you practice at 5 p.m., I'll practice at 6 p.m. That way the music didn't collide with one another.

I've always believed that happiness is just around the corner. The trick is fining the right corner.

It is a fact of human nature that we derive pleasure from watching others engage in pleasurable acts. This explains the popularity of two enterprises: pornography and cafés.

Someone like Mozart moves from Salzburg to Vienna, where all of the sudden he finds this musical city that is not only asking for music, it's demanding music of him.

Normally, we think of the religious as people who care more, not less than the rest of us. This is not true, not exactly. The truly religious care more deeply about fewer things and do't give a hoot about the rest.

Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, none of them were born in Vienna. They all moved there. It became a magnet, but what made it magnetized in the first place? There has to be a seed there. In the case of Vienna of about 1780, it was this deep-seated love of music.