With creative people, truly new horizons open up.

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.

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.

I came together with younger musicians and tried to pass on my own experiences. In the process, I always tried to maintain my curiosity and spontaneity.

Strength for today, overflowing grace.

A chronic poet should always be an inveterate nature-lover.

By liberating women from household work and helping to abolish professions such as domestic service, the washing machine and other household goods completely revolutionised the structure of society.

If I'm going to see my mom, I'm going to church!

Out of all this struggle a good thing is going to grow. That makes it worthwhile.

Evil acts of the past are never rectified by evil acts of the present.

Genius is mainly an affair of energy.

Art once made a cult of beauty. Now we have a cult of ugliness instead. This has made art into an elaborate joke, one which by now has ceased to be funny.

Carlito likes to swap spit with men who don't want to be cool.