When you love somebody and they die young and you are young, too, it is very hard.

When you get to be 103, modernism is a very wide concept.

The tempo is the suitcase. If the suitcase is too small, everything is completely wrinkled. If the tempo is too fast, everything becomes so scrambled you can't understand it.

Controversial means somebody who makes people think. And if you are afraid of people who will be against you, you might as well stay home and do nothing.

They're a wonderful bunch of people. These young people share the strongest passion in their life, which is music. But there's no political plan or political line. There are people who come and become more tolerant, and others come and become more intolerant. But for the time they're there and working together it is almost a utopian republic.

Wagner is contrapuntal in a philosophical way as well as a musical way. What I mean by that is that every tendency has its opposite, and you see that in the man himself. He's a metaphysical hermaphrodite - he embraces hard and soft, masculine and feminine.