I just wish, maybe, that I'd started conducting earlier. I was about 40 when I started. Apart from that I don't really have any regrets. Is that bad?

Music is a continuum and the modern and avant-garde composers of today will be part of the standard repertoire 30 years from now.

Mozart has written opera, symphony, sacred and chamber music - not to mention his piano and violin concerti.

The awful thing about a conductor becoming geriatric is that you seem to become more desirable, not less.

I would like new people with new ideas to come into it and change it.

If the (British) Arts Council give you money, they also tell you how to spend it.

Most Beethoven symphonies require 80 or more instruments, and the late romantics even more.

So I've never found there was any particular separation between the two cultures at all, musically speaking.

There are some sounds that English singers find quite difficult to manipulate.

We don't want other people poking into our artistic pie.

Initially we performed in halls with capacities of 1,000.

An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.

Histories, chronologies and almanacs offer us the illusion of progress, even though, over and over again, we are given proof that there is no such thing.

Humor is the secret into the audience's other ranges of emotions.

I like to come to Washington, D.C., at least once a year. Why should my tax money travel more than I do?

There were moments when she wasn't talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funnelled stretch of recent past.

I like style. For Dior, I did more of a collaboration shoot, not just a single image - so there was more to it. It's a very prestigious brand. I like their style and feel like their style is mine.

I'm really very concerned with helping to create an attitude of freedom and daring toward the craft of photography.

The Way of Tao is this: It strives not, but conquers; It speaks not, but all is made clear; It summons not, but its house is crowded; It contrives not, but the design is perfect.

Sometimes it's not the optimist you need, but another pessimist to walk beside you.

I wrote a number of pieces in the year 1966 that were so bad that, although I'm a great collector of my own pieces, I have never collected them.