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

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.

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.

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.

The only way you will ever permanently take control of your financial life is to dig deep and fix the root problem.

Courage can't see around corners but goes around them anyway.

The discontented man finds no easy chair.

The worst part of losing good fish is that you cannot release them. They tailwalk across the back of your mind for days.

Blood spurted from his nose. Okay, I couldn't help myself. I burst out laughing.

You don't get there because, you get there in spite of.

I think my style is classic - I like wearing jeans and a white button-up shirt.

Let the RINOs start a third party

There is a basic problem that a lot of Western monks and nuns become ordained without really understanding or appreciating what the monastic life is all about.

It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional.