Never forget that your days are blessed. You may know how to profit by them, or you may not, but they are blesses.

To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music, we must break them.

The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion.

Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.

It is nothing to succeed if one has not taken great trouble, and it is nothing to fail if one has done the best one could.

Loving a child doesn't mean giving in to all his whims; to love him is to bring out the best in him, to teach him to love what is difficult.

The art of music is so deep and profound that to approach it very seriously only is not enough. One must approach music with a serious rigor and, at the same time, with a great, affectionate joy.

Do not take up music unless you would rather die than not do so.

Do nothing for effect. Do it for truth.

Without discipline, there can be no freedom.

Nothing is better than music; when it takes us out of time, it has done more for us than we have the right to hope for.

The price of ignorance is usually a life of frustration and destruction.

Although the infertile are entitled to sour grapes, it's against the rules, isn't it, to actually have a baby and spend any time at all on that banished parallel life in which you didn't.

Is there some thought being given to subsidizing the clearing of rainforests in order for some countries to eliminate that production of greenhouse gases?

Have you ever heard the expression 'one hot mess?' I think the term was custom-made for the mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford.

Conductors' careers are made for the most part with 'Romantic' music. 'Classic' music eliminates the conductor; we do not remember him in it.

Literary education must follow the education of the hand -the one gift that distinguishes man from beast.

I'm like a bird, I'll only fly away...

I write music with an exclamation point!

The greatest gift I can give is to see, hear, understand, and touch another person.