The experience awakened 'my tremendous musical ambition, which has never subsided to this day.

Mozart makes you believe in God because it cannot be by chance that such a phenomenon arrives into this world and leaves such an unbounded number of unparalleled masterpieces.

The joy of working with the Chicago Symphony was immeasureable.

Fight the tendency to become complacent and do one kind of music - that is the death of a musician.

Everyone says you have to be a specialist, and if you conduct Wagner you cannot conduct Mozart - this is nonsense.

The academy gave me a grounding in discipline and hard work that has sustained me throughout my life, and the lessons I learned there I now try to impress on young people.

I wanted to get away from my past and everything connected with it.

I would never have become music director of the Chicago Symphony, which would have been an extremely sad loss.

My entire learning process is slow, because I have no visual memory.

Between the two men, somewhere, a truth is lying, and that is what I try to find.

I can only hope that neither of them was scarred by their upbringing.

When I was young, I would sit in the bath and ideas would come to me. But I'm not young any more, so now I just sit in the bath.

If children feel safe, they can take risks, ask questions, make mistakes, learn to trust, share their feelings, and grow.

I am not (yet) facing the problem of emigration. I want my music to be acknowledged here first of all, in this country: after that, we shall see - perhaps the question will then become urgent.

I have found that she is as kind and caring a person as she is hilarious. Simply put, Amy Poehler is my hero.

The commander in the field is always right and the rear echelon is wrong, unless proved otherwise.

I like to be admired from afar, and then complimented up close.

No one ever wants to see his or her name linked to anything bad. Conscience is like a baby. It has to go to sleep before you can.

To say one is revolutionary is a little like saying one is a Zen Buddhist - if you say you are, you probably aren't.

Life is only what you wonder. Day is light as your brightest dream.

Think globally, act locally": "Our salvation depends upon our ability to create a religion of nature.