When I am with composers, I say I am a conductor. When I am with conductors, I say I am a composer.

Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

Life without music is unthinkable.

It is the artists of the world, the feelers and the thinkers who will ultimately save us; who can articulate, educate, defy, insist, sing and shout the big dreams.

The second fiddle. I can get plenty of first violinists, but to find someone who can play the second fiddle with enthusiasm

A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.

A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.

I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .

I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.

When I was little, my dad used to tell me, "Will, you can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friends nose.

Politicians are interested in the health of the people like predators savor live prey.

I'm the same way about the bookshop. You know, I walk around and I feel the whole world is in there, the most important stories of all time.

Love is a snowflake for no two are ever the same.

Even when I became the typical shy adolescent, I never minded performing. I felt there was a kind of safety, a protection about being on stage, about losing myself in another character.

To think big is to love the universe, to embrace our passion. To love is to fight for what we love. What a waste not to, when we have only this one life to live.

How fast were you?" Wes asked me. I said, "Not that fast." "You mean you couldn't... fly?" he said, smiling at me.

It's strange to describe reading a book as a really great experience, but that's kind of how it felt.

He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.

I have butterflies in my stomach.