Anyone who composes and conducts at the same time is immediately suspect, because he must be faking one or the other.

Once you get over the first hill, there is always a new, higher one lurking, of course.

There will have to be times when I'm not conducting because I'm composing. I haven't solved that problem, and perhaps I never will.

Orchestras have become used to the emphasis on the separation of layers, of the ultimate precision and clarity.

As we watch TV or films, there are no organic transitions, only edits. The idea of A becoming B, rather than A jumping to B, has become foreign.

The act of conducting in itself, of waving my arms in the air and being in charge, I didn't miss. I missed the sensual pleasure of being in contact with music.

My music wouldn't sound the way it does if I hadn't had the experience of conducting.

Pulse as an active means of expression, Stravinsky and Beethoven are the two masters of that.

This conducting thing happened. In 1983 I was sucked into this international career, which was a very scary experience.

I discovered that the people of the North are different and there's no way you can make a person from the North similar to a Southerner. They're two different worlds.

I feel very free and very happy to be a composer.

True prosperity is the result of well-placed confidence in ourselves and our fellow man.

There are all kinds of things you can do to marry literacy with health.

As the Church is the aggregate of believers, there is an intimate analogy between the experience of the individual believer, and of the Church as a whole.

Strive for excellence, not perfection.

A dentist is only half the doctor he claims to be.

After you've been wounded a few times, it's hard to let somebody get that deep again.

It is not easy to distinguish between true and false affection, unless there occur one of those crises in which, as gold is tried by fire, so a faithful friendship may be tested by danger.

At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product.

I am coming to terms with the fact that loving someone requires a leap of faith, and that a soft landing is never guaranteed.

No captain with all the hindsight in the world can predict how the wicket is going to play