[On being asked how it felt to be the first female conductor of the Boston Symphony:] I've been a woman for a little more than fifty years, and I've gotten over my original astonishment.

To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music, we must break them.

The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion.

Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.

It is nothing to succeed if one has not taken great trouble, and it is nothing to fail if one has done the best one could.

Loving a child doesn't mean giving in to all his whims; to love him is to bring out the best in him, to teach him to love what is difficult.

The art of music is so deep and profound that to approach it very seriously only is not enough. One must approach music with a serious rigor and, at the same time, with a great, affectionate joy.

Do not take up music unless you would rather die than not do so.

Do nothing for effect. Do it for truth.

Without discipline, there can be no freedom.

Nothing is better than music; when it takes us out of time, it has done more for us than we have the right to hope for.

Enlightenment is not a rocket science, it is the pure awareness of something deep within you that is ageless, formless and undefinable.

The world, like a dream full of attachments and aversions seems real until the awakening.

It's the people who are doing the nonviolent organizing at the grassroots that make me think there's still hope.

I will reform our broken visa system. Nearly half of the people in this country illegally came here on legal visas and simply never left. We need to fix that.

I can’t wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it.

People like us are unhappy in this world and in the next, I guess if we made it to heaven, we'd have to help make it thunder.

Avoid people with gold teeth who want to play cards

When you pay your money to see me, I want you to have the best concert you can have from me.

It humbles me, but it doesn't humiliate me.

Imagination is only intelligence having fun. A healthy mind knows how to switch between worlds, and which one you need to eat and sleep in.