I believe in people. I feel, love, need and respect people above all else, including natural scenery, organized piety and nationalistic superstructures. One human figure on the slope of a mountain can make the mountain disappear for me, one person fighting for truth can disqualify for me the entire system which had dispensed it.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

Mozart combines serenity, melancholy, and tragic intensity into one great lyric improvisation. Over it all hovers the greater spirit that is Mozart's - the spirit of compassion, of universal love, even of suffering - a spirit that knows no age, that belongs to all ages.

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.

If you're a good composer, you steal good steals.

Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.

When I am with composers, I say I am a conductor. When I am with conductors, I say I am a composer.