All music has to speak in some form or other.

Within each individual young person you meet, you have the same fields to plough. The trick is just to wake them up, to sharpen their ears for what's already there in the music.

With creative people, truly new horizons open up.

In Romanticism, the main determinant is the mood, the atmosphere. And in that regard, you could also describe Schubert as a Romantic.

The future? Like unwritten books and unborn children, you don't talk about it.

Unfortunately, it happens all too seldom that you really disappear behind a work, that you are no longer audible as an interpreter.

Many, many composers have only found their way to a certain form, through familiarizing themselves with texts.

Toward the end of his life, one can sense that he was no longer thinking his way into the minds of others, causing them to speak on his behalf, but that he was now speaking for himself.

The composition of a single melody is born out of a bit of text, perhaps the first line, but it can also be the entire strophe; it can even be the poem's overall form.

But the thing that will always occupy me the most is music.

I came together with younger musicians and tried to pass on my own experiences. In the process, I always tried to maintain my curiosity and spontaneity.

I get into beatific cornucopia when I delve into books, coffee, and wanderings!

No one leaves home unless homes is the mouth of a shark.

There could never be innocence in a world without justice.

I don't think I've ever really had a home before, not until I met you.

Some people do crossword puzzles. I do books.

Do not suppose, first of all, that Mao Tse-tung could be the "saviour" of China. Nonsense. There will never be one "saviour" of China. Yet undeniably you feel a certain force of destiny in him.

You can't keep things secret in a film anymore. Once you realize the secret's out, you might as well go with it and not pretend that it's not there.

The key to understanding the rise in inequality isn't technology or globalization. It's the power of the moneyed interests to shape the underlying rules of the market.

Hatred can be nurtured anywhere, idealism can be perverted into sadism anywhere. If hatred and sadism combine with modern technology the inferno could erupt anew anywhere.

The duty of labor is written on a man's body: in the stout muscle of the arm,, and the delicate machinery of the hand.