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.

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.

Always find sense in your actions

Those who lived in peaceful nations had looked the other way as members of their own species starved on their door step.

Every cat knows how to keep his owner feeding them: You may scratch and bite ninety-nine times, but the hundredth time, you must leap into a lap and press your nose to their nose. Rules are for dogs.

A large part of mankind is angry not with the sins, but with the sinners.

We're all God's children.

She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.

No matter how hard you try to be present at home, you're always doing the things that you have to do.

I am pleased to be praised by a man so praised as you, father. [Words used by Hector.] [Lat., Laetus sum Laudari me abs te, pater, laudato viro.]

Experience comprises illusions lost, rather than wisdom gained.

Judas heard all Christ's sermons.