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

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

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.

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

Since we cling to our hope in the future, we do not focus our energies and capabilities on the present moment

If you wait until the next upgrade, you will never upgrade.

Posterity will say as usual: "In the past things were better the present is worse than the past."

There is no way to be truly great in this world. We are all impaled on the crook of conditioning.

With the brush we merely tint, while the imagination alone produces colour.

I'm a journalist - I'm not Robert Caro. I have a day job, and a pretty consuming one - a joyfully consuming one.

We must be holy, because this is the only sound evidence that we have a saving faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.

I do like to sing to God!

If you're a gifted flirt, talking about the price of eggs will do as well as any other subject.

I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without.