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" If you think the music business is the be-all and end-all of life, you're in big trouble. "

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" Conductors start getting good when everybody else retires. "

" We need to bring music to the people, even to those who normally do not listen to classical music. "

" We have to be evangelists for music. We couldn't just be high priests of music. "

" Learning music is a birthright. And you have to start young. "

" Every orchestra has its own sound. "

" The jazz records come out a lot. You find that with many musicians - we don't listen to our own music for relaxation. "

" It's interesting: composers can be very funny ducks. "

" As a Liverpool boy, it is impossible not to think of the Beatles' question, 'Will you still need me when I'm 64?' "

" I think the English are an unbelievably musical nation and always have been. "

" I was a harpsichordist in my teens, and there was a bunch of us in Liverpool who got together every week to play Bach. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" I've always had a profound conviction that great music is about joy, even in the face of tragedy. "

" I first heard Mahler's second symphony aged 11 in Liverpool, and it inspired me to become a conductor. "

" '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. "

" There are a few great orchestras in the world, thank goodness. Although some people do put them in ranking order, it's not like a snooker match. Each orchestra has different things to offer. "

" I love Mozart, but I often make a terrible hash of it. "

" Passionate musicians only come from passionate five-year-olds. "

" Beethoven was always too much. He's not slightly anything - he's very everything. "

" Conducting 'Tristan' is like floating in amniotic fluid, but having worked on it for three months, I now know why people who go near it go so strange. "

" Nobody has Francis Bacon on their walls in their house - or very few people - but sometimes people listen to Beethoven as though it was background and a comfort, and I think that is very dangerous. "

" Always the journey, never the destination. "

" As an older dad you can certainly get down on the floor. The problem is can you get up again? "

" Liverpool is off the side of the known universe, and it always was. New York is the only other place comparable. "

" I believe if you're not completely in love with what you're doing, you'd better find another profession. "

" Yes, I was a weird duck, no doubt. "

" In my mid-twenties, I was with a conducting career, but I had never been to university and I wanted to. There were things I wanted to study in depth. I also wanted to see if I could survive without music. "

" Some of my favorite music in the world is Haydn. I had a sabbatical one year and made myself one promise: to play a different Haydn piano sonata each day - they are inexhaustible treasures. "

" Conductors make too much fuss about conductors! Humility and hard work are virtues. We're nothing without our musicians. "

" I think Beethoven means dissonances to be more stressed than consonances - it's the shock tactician in him. "