The creative process is like music which takes root with extraordinary force and rapidity

Music is an incomparably more powerful means and is a subtler language for expressing the thousand different moments of the soul's moods.

Where the heart does not enter; there can be no music.

To regret the past, to hope in the future, and never to be satisfied with the present: that is what I spend my whole life doing

Truly there would be reason to go mad were it not for music.

Inspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy.

Madam, you ask me how I compose. I compose sitting down.

Music possesses much richer means of expression and it is a more subtle medium for translating the 1000 shifting moments of the feelings of the soul.

After the last notes of Gotterdammerung I felt as though I had been let out of prison.

I like the plot of The Nutcracker - not at all.

What I need is to believe in myself again — for my faith has been greatly undermined; it seems to me my role is over.

The respect one gets in the forces by virtue of the ‘rank’ is not absolute. 'True respect’ is the one that is earned by virtue of actions, experience, knowledge and demeanor.

Well, because music is my life and music is not work for me.

Anything you put your mind to and add your imagination into can make your life a lot better and a lot more fun.

I'm not crazy about country-western music. But the lyrics are good.

If a woman's got any instincts, she feels when her husband's off the reservation.

If you take the biological weapons in the United States we still will have perhaps a single individual who was able to make anthrax, dry it, and spread it through the mail and cause terror.

The costliness of keeping friends does not lie in what one does for them, but in what one, out of consideration for them, refrains from doing.

In an information society, education is no mere amenity; it is the prime tool for growing people and profits.

In the end when you get your master back, you realize it's got absolutely nothing to do with what you thought it was going to be when you started.

I love working with children and this young boy, Thomas Sangster, is quite a remarkable young actor. He raises your game, you know. He certainly raised mine.