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

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.

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.

Must one become seventy years old to recognize that one's greatest strength lies in creating musical kitsch?

Talk is cheap when your words are of no value

If somebody praises you

Fun, like champagne bubbles, can't completely fill you up.

Surrounding myself with women of different backgrounds and on different paths and in different stages of their lives has become so valuable to me.

I want what's mine. I see other actors who are doing very interesting roles, and I just want to continue to do things that are interesting, and things that people will go see in theaters.

A huge problem in movies or with people who work on movies is that two people can look at the same thing but they don't necessarily see the same thing.

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

I think in New York we had respect and we would pretty much fill up the places where we went, but I never got the sense that we really were Number 1 here in New York among the Latin crowds.

Someone once bought me loads of clothes from a charity shop - and sent them to me in a black bin liner. That was weird. I went through it and it was full of bizarre outfits like Abba costumes.