Classical music is a wonderful 1200 year-old tradition that witnesses everything that it has meant and what it means right now to be human.

Being a conductor is kind of a hybrid profession because most fundamentally, it is being someone who is a coach, a trainer, an editor, a director.

If you're curious, if you have a capacity for wonder, if you're alive, you know all that you need to know [about music].

Classical music is an unbroken, living tradition that goes back over 1,000 years, and every one of those years has had something unique and powerful to say to us about what it's like to be alive.

The big difference between human happiness and sadness? Thirty-seven freakin' vibrations.

You can't have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers. They simply define what music is!

The whole path of American music has been so much about the recognition of stylistic diversity, and the recognition of the importance of music which was from one of the vernacular traditions.

I think music needs to be presented in a way so that kids can grasp songs, dances, simple music that's associated with some particular defining moment in human experience.

When I first was conducting as guest conductor in Europe 25 years ago, I would propose doing American pieces and grudgingly it would be accepted from time to time.

Extreme volume in music very often disguises a lack of actually important content.

One of my central maxims is how a major part of what a conductor tries to do is get a large group of people to agree on where "now" actually is.

Maxim 29: The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. No more. No less.-The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries

Wives are young men's mistresses companions for middle age and old men's nurses.

Perhaps only when people can enjoy their differences as a resource of cultural enrichment do they become truly civilized.

I was always the ugly duckling; I never got attention from girls.

My dream artists to collaborate with are probably Cee Lo Green and Imogen Heap. They're completely out of my genre but they're both musical geniuses.

In a corporation, there can only be one guy in the end: the CEO.

How often my soul visits the National Gallery, and how seldom

I think this [Gnomeo & Juliet] is the closest I ought to get to Shakespeare to be honest.

As a reporter, you develop an ear for dialogue because it's your job to capture it accurately.

Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men.