The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion.

In music everything is prolonged, everything is edified, and when the enchantment has ceased, we are still bathed in its clarity; solitude is accompanied by a new hope between pity for ourselves - which makes us more indulgent and more understanding - and the certitude of finding something again, that which lives for ever in music.

[On being asked how it felt to be the first female conductor of the Boston Symphony:] I've been a woman for a little more than fifty years, and I've gotten over my original astonishment.

Without discipline, there can be no freedom.

As far as the execution is concerned ... the most frequent and most serious mistake is to follow the music instead of preceding it.

You should never listen to someone practice. That is their work and theirs alone.

Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.