"I will keep playing as long as my body lets me, and as long as I'm wanted by my listeners. Because music is the only thing that keeps me going."
"Everybody has a right to like or dislike anything or anyone. From a flower to a flavor to a book or a composition but it is very sad that in our country we actually fight over such things in an unseemly manner."
"In our culture we have such respect for musical instruments, they are like part of God."
"My secret ambition was always to provide music for animation films: something with an Indian theme, either a fairy tale or mythological tale or on the Krishna theme. I still have a very deep desire, but these sorts of chances don't always come."
"Pop changes week to week, month to month. But great music is like literature."
"My music has a very spiritual background, a sanctity that is almost like worship."
"I have great difficulty sitting in the middle of the night and writing. Everything I do comes spontaneous. Sometimes it takes a long time; sometimes it comes just like that."
"I think musicians and actors have all these problems, because of the popularity and the opportunity."
"When people say that George Harrison made me famous, that is true in a way."
"In the olden days, I believe Mozart also improvised on piano, but somehow in the last 200 years, the whole training of Western classical music - they don't read between the lines, they just read the lines."
"One single raga can be performed for two hours, three hours."
"I started out as a dancer, but gradually became more interested in music."
"I love the work of Matisse and Picasso, but I don't have enough millions to own one. And I don't really believe in owning art, anyway."
"I don't appreciate avant-garde, electronic music. It makes me feel quite ill."
"Many people, especially young people, have started listening to sitar since George Harrison, one of the Beatles, became my disciple."
"I believe in one thing: that anyone who is able to do something good for someone, I mean, should be praised."
"To me, you know, from my childhood I always had a fascination for United States."
"I was invited for the first Woodstock. Actually, I started the programme."
"My brother had a house in Paris. To it came many Western classical musicians. These musicians all made the same point: 'Indian music,' they said, 'is beautiful when we hear it with the dancers. On its own, it is repetitious and monotonous.'"
"I have always had an instinct for doing new things. Call it good or bad, I love to experiment."
"In India, I have been called a 'destroyer.' But that is only because they mixed my identity as a performer and as a composer. As a composer I have tried everything, even electronic music and avant-garde. But as a performer I am, believe me, getting more classical and more orthodox, jealously protecting the heritage that I have learned."
"I enjoy seeing other Indian musicians - old and young - coming to Europe and America and having some success. I'm happy to have contributed to that."
"Ah, 'Pather Panchali' was the most inspiring film that I wrote music for, and it was so spontaneously done. I saw the film, composed on the spot, along with myself and only four other musicians, and everything was done within 4-1/2 hours, I think an all-time record anywhere."
"I have my own spiritual guru, and I'm so happy, and I feel so satisfied that I might appreciate many other famous gurus, but, you know, I am not attracted that way because I have found the person."
"'Ravi' means 'sun.' It's a Sanskrit original word. And 'Shankar' is another name of Shiva, one of the holy trinity god that we worship."
