"My worst and best qualities are rashness: the good part of it is due to youth, which is, of course, why I'm not a great conductor."
"If you think the music business is the be-all and end-all of life, you're in big trouble."
"As an older dad you can certainly get down on the floor. The problem is can you get up again?"
"Learning music is a birthright. And you have to start young."
"Conductors make too much fuss about conductors! Humility and hard work are virtues. We're nothing without our musicians."
"Oh Lord... I don't really do pride."
"I am old enough to remember the enormous fight over Tate Modern. It is such a part of our cultural landscape now, we forget the opposition to it."
"In England, unless I am mistaken, I think some of the politicians who love classical music and opera are a bit loath to be seen there in case people think it is elitist. That is a real shame because it also means we are not allowing our politicians a hinterland that an earlier generation, a Denis Healey, would have taken for granted."
"I was thrilled that Sadiq Khan was so in support of the idea of culture being at the centre of a city and the idea that it is everyone's right. It can't be a matter of privilege or chance. It should be something everyone can have in their life, and that means knowing what it is."
"I think we will find more and more ways in which technology invades our artistic spaces, so music is something you will need more than ever because it is there in time and in space and for that moment only."
"I've always loved French music. My parents adored it; my father played it on the piano."
"I love Mozart, but I often make a terrible hash of it."
"Germans have an understanding of history and cannot allow themselves to forget it. It may be a curse, but in some ways, it's a blessing. It makes them cautious."
"American economists can't understand the German fear of inflation and the effects of inflation when dealing with the world economic crisis. They wonder why Germany pursues such a different course - 'Why can't they agree with us?' I would have thought it was fairly obvious."
"As a nation, we English tend to be self-deprecating, looking down on ourselves. We're insular but also flexible, whereas in Germany, it's a case of besser wissen - we know better. That's very Deutsch. People are never frightened to tell you what you're doing wrong, in a way that would never happen in England."
"The necessity for rules and strictness is a way of dealing with an enormously powerful impulse: Germans are among the most emotional people on the planet. Maybe it has to do with the fact that, as a nation, they are always drawn back to nature and the forest."
"Conductors start getting good when everybody else retires."
"I think the English are an unbelievably musical nation and always have been."
"'Pelleas et Melisande' is one of the saddest and most upsetting operas ever written. If you love the opera as I do, then you love it to pieces, obsessively."
"Sometimes, musicians worry too much about how beautifully they are playing."
"I was a harpsichordist in my teens, and there was a bunch of us in Liverpool who got together every week to play Bach."
"What really counts isn't whether your instrument is Baroque or modern: it's your mindset."
"If you receive a whole string of bad reviews, you have to say, 'O.K., maybe there's something here we should pay attention to.'"
"Liverpool is off the side of the known universe, and it always was. New York is the only other place comparable."
"You don't like Liverpool: you either loathe it or you love it. And I don't know anyone who loathes it and comes from it."
