After 30 years I have realized the greatest pleasure I can get is to have learnt.

I discovered that the people of the North are different and there's no way you can make a person from the North similar to a Southerner. They're two different worlds.

I went to work one morning, and outside my door was Cindy Crawford in a black bra, and I thought that very clearly the building is making progress in integrating itself into various layers of our culture.

Of course, if you think of a European or American household in the '50s, so what were the things that when people started climbing up the ladder, what did they buy? A fridge, a TV, I think piano was the number three item in say '53 or '54.

The biggest difference between U.S and most European big cities is that in a place like London, for instance, there are five orchestras, and there's a bloody competition between these five orchestras.

With American orchestras, in particular, because they play in such huge halls, getting a true pianissimo is very hard.

There will have to be times when I'm not conducting because I'm composing. I haven't solved that problem, and perhaps I never will.