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

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.

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

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 may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.

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

I shall never be converted, and I shall remain true to my old religion of the classics until my life's end.