On conducting: If you can just barely hear the French horns on stage, the balance is perfect.

don't perspire while conducting - only the audience should get warm.

If you think that the brass is not blowing loud enough, mute it by a couple of degrees.

Ideas, like young wine, should be put in storage and taken up again only after they have been allowed to ferment and to ripen.

I want to be able to depict in music a glass of beer so accurately that every listener can tell whether it is a Pilsner or a Kulmbacher.

The aria, after all, is the soul of opera.

Its a funny thing Alice, dying is just the way I composed it in Tod und Verklärung.