The work is the most important thing.

All music has to speak in some form or other.

Within each individual young person you meet, you have the same fields to plough. The trick is just to wake them up, to sharpen their ears for what's already there in the music.

With creative people, truly new horizons open up.

In Romanticism, the main determinant is the mood, the atmosphere. And in that regard, you could also describe Schubert as a Romantic.

The future? Like unwritten books and unborn children, you don't talk about it.

Unfortunately, it happens all too seldom that you really disappear behind a work, that you are no longer audible as an interpreter.

Many, many composers have only found their way to a certain form, through familiarizing themselves with texts.

Toward the end of his life, one can sense that he was no longer thinking his way into the minds of others, causing them to speak on his behalf, but that he was now speaking for himself.

The composition of a single melody is born out of a bit of text, perhaps the first line, but it can also be the entire strophe; it can even be the poem's overall form.

But the thing that will always occupy me the most is music.

When life gives you lemons, use Cosmic Ordering!

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

Social media is less about technology and more about anthropology, sociology, and ethnography.

Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger.

The truth is, wherever you choose to be, it's the wrong place.

The arts are the only things that separate us from the other animals. The arts are not decorative. ... They are essential to our comprehension of consciousness and ourselves.

This is the Lord's doing. And it is marvelous in our eyes.

The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital.

Whenever people ask you where you're from and you say New Orleans, it's always going to create a conversation.

Consciously or unconsciously, we are all striving for perfection. Every being must attain to it.