We don't want other people poking into our artistic pie.

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.

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

She is her. You are not her.

The onslaught of scruples is a problem well attested in the spiritual life, especially among the young, where religious observances must be done perfectly to achieve a certain result.

If you don't design your own life plan, chances are you'll fall into someone else's plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.

Self knowledge is the beginning of self improvement.

You can choose your friends but you sho' can't choose your family, an' they're still kin to you no matter whether you acknowledge 'em or not, and it makes you look right silly when you don't.

Fighting is essentially a masculine idea; a woman's weapon is her tongue.

There can be no nonviolence offered by the militarily strong.

One fine day as my mother was putting the bread in the oven, I went up to her and taking her by her flour-smeared elbow I said to her, Mama I want to be a painter.

Sixty years is cause enough to sing In celebration of a gentle life! To the mother and the wife, Taking pleasure in what love might bring, Yearning for what's worth the treasuring.

Over the years, a number of very smart people have learned the hard way that a long string of impressive numbers multiplied by a single zero always equals zero.