I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.

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.

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

Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.

Our most emotionally active life is lived in our dreams, and our cells renew themselves most industriously in sleep. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great; he is free from the experience of hostility; he is a poet, and most like an angel.

Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff