Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.

The 20th century has been a badly written drama, from the beginning.

A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.

In the olden days, everybody sang. You were expected to sing as well as talk. It was a mark of the cultured man to sing.

I have two answers to everything and one answer to nothing.

Einstein said that "the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious." So why do so many of us try to explain the beauty of music, thus depriving it of its mystery?

Even experimental composers, revolutionary composers, self-styled radicals are, in writing revolutionary music, recognizing the music that preceded them precisely by trying to avoid it.