For me, Venezuela is very important, not just because it's a place I go to conduct, but because my family is there - my wife, my parents and my musical family.

Whenever I listen to a children's orchestra, I learn. They feel everything, they enjoy everything, they have amazing energy.

Music is a fundamental human right

The challenge is not so much to change the sound. The challenge is to connect and to create something special.

It's not that people don't like classical music. It's that they don't have the chance to understand and to experience it.

With an orchestra you are building citizens, better citizens for the community.

You have to believe that things will happen, you have to work and love what you're doing.

I set out to create a means whereby music could be a way of vindicating the rights of the masses.

When people feel that something really special is happening on the stage, things change.

In my imagination yes, I remember, when I was six years old, I was conducting all this concert in my house. But now it's real.

Classical music in Venezuela is now something like a pop concert. You can see people screaming or crying because they don't have a ticket.

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that refledts it.

Seize opportunity by the beard for it is bald behind.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

I claim my heart's desire, and I choose my direction. I will attain my chosen goal.

I always not only want push the envelope in my career but I also have an itch for going against the grain.

You want to know the hardest thing about being smart? What? I pretty much always know what's going to happen next; there's no suspense.

With no pretensions of art, Viva Las Vegas, the new Elvis Presley vehicle, is about as pleasant and unimportant as a Banana Split.

[The Republicans] looked at basically the failed wars and they said, oh, this, us being the policeman of the world, that is not working.

The most evident token and apparent sign of true wisdom is a constant and unconstrained rejoicing.

If you don't leave, I'll get somebody who will.