It was an initiation into the love of learning, of learning how to learn . . . as a matter of interdisciplinary cognition - that is, learning to know something by its relation to something else."

Music . . . can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.

"The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another inevitably . . . and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world."

"Any great work of art . . . revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air."