don't perspire while conducting - only the audience should get warm.

I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.

The human voice is the most beautiful instrument of all, but the most difficult to play.

I want to be able to depict in music a glass of beer so accurately that every listener can tell whether it is a Pilsner or a Kulmbacher.

I shall never be converted, and I shall remain true to my old religion of the classics until my life's end.

Ideas, like young wine, should be put in storage and taken up again only after they have been allowed to ferment and to ripen.

Its a funny thing Alice, dying is just the way I composed it in Tod und Verklärung.

On conducting: If you can just barely hear the French horns on stage, the balance is perfect.

If you think that the brass is not blowing loud enough, mute it by a couple of degrees.

Never look at the trombones, you'll just encourage them.

Never look at the brass - it only encourages them.

Critics do not determine how high an eagle flies.

All things must change To something new to something strange.

It would be wisest not to worry too much about the sterile periods. They ventilate the subject and instill into it the reality of daily life.

I don't think of being a woman in an industry of men. I didn't walk into the kitchen and go, 'Ooh, I'm a girl!' I didn't get into my chosen profession. I wanted to be good at something.

To reach people no one else is reaching we must do things no one else is doing

I was as happy as a fish in water, and I could have stayed in that room for ever, have never left that place.

The happy do not believe in miracles.

You get below the Mason-Dixon line and you have some of the best music, culture, the two races, the literature, and it's so rich.

Love manufactures every man into a poet while the fever lasts.

I find comedy to be one of the highest of the art forms.