When someone you love dies, you don't lose them all at once. You lose them in pieces over time, like how the mail stops coming.
Do nothing for effect. Do it for truth.
I've been a woman for a little over 50 years and have gotten over my initial astonishment. As for conducting an orchestra, that's a job where I don't think sex plays much part.
To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music, we must break them.
Nothing is better than music; when it takes us out of time, it has done more for us than we have the right to hope for: it has broadened the limits of our sorrowful life, it has lit up the sweetness of our hours of happiness by effacing the pettinesses that diminish us, bringing us back pure and new to what was, what will be, what music has created for us.
The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion.
It is so much easier to rest contented with what we have already acquired than to change ever so slightly those routine but profound habits of thought and feeling which govern our life, and by which we live so blissfully. This mental inertia is, perhaps, our greatest enemy. Insidiously it leads us to assume that we can renew our lives without renewing our habits.
Anything you ever make that matters takes a long time. Some artists never see their work in front of an audience, so for them 15 years is a blink of an eye. I am nothing but grateful.
It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.
A liberally educated person meets new ideas with curiosity and fascination. An illiberally educated person meets new ideas with fear.
You know, since the 6th century, Sunni and Shia have been fighting.