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

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

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.

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

Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.

I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.

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