If we perform the romantic repertoire we need more musicians.

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.

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?

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.

Whenever possible, choose peace.

The artist is the only one qualified to criticize his art, because only the artist knows what he was trying to express and how satisfied he is with the attempt.

I can't even tell you how many different shows I would love to guest star on because there's just too many.

I can't keep somebody from being a star, and I can't make somebody a star, and nobody can.

I don't really like wearing bikinis. And if you don't either, don't make yourself.

For self is the lord of self, self is the refuge of self; therefore curb thyself as the merchant curbs a good horse.

Long, flat expanses of professionalism bother me. I'd rather have a band that could explode at any time.

Far away, to an infinite world I escape. I'm clear and calm, I'm unafraid. Sunless days, in my sheltered milkyway. In Saturn's rings I feel no pain.

This sort of dwindling band of true believers each year gets together and talks about the wonderful progress that's been made. None of the rest of us can ever see that.

What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up