Mozart makes you believe in God because it cannot be by chance that such a phenomenon arrives into this world and leaves such an unbounded number of unparalleled masterpieces.

The joy of working with the Chicago Symphony was immeasureable.

Fight the tendency to become complacent and do one kind of music - that is the death of a musician.

Everyone says you have to be a specialist, and if you conduct Wagner you cannot conduct Mozart - this is nonsense.

The academy gave me a grounding in discipline and hard work that has sustained me throughout my life, and the lessons I learned there I now try to impress on young people.

I wanted to get away from my past and everything connected with it.

The experience awakened 'my tremendous musical ambition, which has never subsided to this day.

I would never have become music director of the Chicago Symphony, which would have been an extremely sad loss.

My entire learning process is slow, because I have no visual memory.

Between the two men, somewhere, a truth is lying, and that is what I try to find.

I can only hope that neither of them was scarred by their upbringing.

Hope attracts chances.

We think that boxes take everything that’s bad and they lock all that nasty stuff out, when in reality they take everything that we are and they lock all of those great things in.

When we pray we link ourselves with an inexhaustible motive power.

Courage is impulsive; it is narcissism tempered with nihilism.

There are few young women in existence who have not the power of fascinating, if they choose to exert it.

I think being connected to younger people helps to keep you young and gives you a young attitude.

I realised that if I did what I wanted to do, it would work.

Acceptance, tolerance, bravery, compassion. These are the things my mom taught me!

I think of dance as a constant transformation of life itself.

We [with Neal Dodson and Corey Moosa] were constantly looking for features and looking for ways to get involved with people who were making stuff.