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" With these big Wagner pieces, if I haven't started three years before, I'm screwed. You need time to look at the piece again and again and again, and then, like some fantastic casserole or spaghetti sauce, put it back in the fridge and let the flavours get together. "

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" 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. "

Simon Rattle

Love

Either

Know

" What really counts isn't whether your instrument is Baroque or modern: it's your mindset. "

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

" 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. "

" Oh Lord... I don't really do pride. "

Simon Rattle

Really

Pride

" You would never train people to play football by telling them to watch football. You make them play football. "

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

Simon Rattle

Stressed

Than

" '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. "

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

" 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. "

" One of the most extraordinary and all-encompassing forms of communication is music. It reaches places that all kinds of other things cannot reach. I'll put my cards on the table: I think it is our greatest language. "

" Every orchestra has its own sound. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" My only interest is in sharing great music with more and more people. "

Simon Rattle

Sharing

Great

" I'd be much more likely to watch the latest Tarantino movie than to listen to a Mahler symphony. "

Simon Rattle

Symphony

Watch

" The better the orchestra, often the harder it is to conduct, not the other way around. "

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

Simon Rattle

Older

You

" 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. "

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

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