A lot of it just has to do with luck, serendipity.

The stage is close to being in the middle of the hall, so that the performers are surrounded by the listeners. I feel that we are all experiencing the music together.

We should welcome applause whenever it comes.

Everyone is different. Sometimes it's very exciting; sometimes very scary.

We seem to have set up some very arcane rules as to when it is actually OK to applaud.

Applause should be an emotional response to the music, rather than a regulated social duty.

All of us love applause, and so we should - it means that the listener likes us!

Everybody makes his path differently.

I have always thought that my ear is also very influenced by my eyes.

A lot of it just has to do with luck, serendipity.

It is wonderful to see how happy all my friends in the LA Philharmonic are in their new home.

If there were no rules about when to applaud, we in the audience would have the right response almost always.

Pianists don't argue too much generally because we have such a hard time just getting things right; arguing is for string players.

The sheer force of the music calls for a wild audience reaction.

Sometimes I wish that applause would come just a bit later, when it is so beautifully hushed that I feel like holding my breath in the silence of the end.

I usually only play with very close friends.

I have been coming to Los Angeles since 1975 to perform.

I have been trying to find out exactly when listeners and performers decided that applause between movements would not be allowed, but nobody seems to have been willing to admit that they were the culprit.

How wonderful it is to play with someone you feel very close to.

Even if you don't like a concert of mine, please, please applaud at the end anyway.

If the audience walks out of a concert thinking, What a wonderful experience, then we have done our job.

Mozart often wrote to his family that certain variations or sections of pieces were so successful that they had to be encored immediately, even without waiting for the entire piece to end.

If the audience walks out of a concert thinking What a wonderful experience then we have done our job.

Luck is everything... My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I'm fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn't make a good suspense film.

I still have horrible luck with girls.

How is it the great pieces of good luck fall to us?

With a little bit of luck, you'll never work!

The greatest luck that I've had has been the ability to find men and women who came into my administration who worked with me and brought extraordinary talents that we were able to take full advantage of.

So, it takes a lot of chance and luck. I mean I was lucky enough to get in the program where people with the same skills never made it to the program. So keep trying.

Be grateful for luck. Pay the thunder no mind - listen to the birds. And don't hate nobody.

Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!

I feel I'd like to share my luck and my life. Being in love is the best thing in the world.

Success is simply a matter of luck. Ask any failure.

I used to annoy my father by telling him how much I felt luck was with me.

People always call it luck when you've acted more sensibly than they have.

I have a musical called Goodbye and Good Luck, based on a Grace Paley short story. I also have King Island Christmas, and there are 20 different productions of it this year.

English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.

The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.

Care and diligence bring luck.

So it's probably eighty percent luck and twenty percent skill.

The people have spoken. Their decision is sovereign. We all respect it... I wish good luck to those who will now govern France.

I agree with Sophocles: the greatest luck is not to have been born - but, as the joke goes on, very few people succeed in it.

Luck's always to blame.

I had the luck that my parents educated me in three languages. With my mother I spoke Dutch, with my father Italian, and in the school I learned German. But my host language is Italian.

It was depressing, very depressing. I worried about how I would make a living. I didn't want to stay on the farm. It didn't offer the challenge I wanted and yet, without a college education, I felt that I was really out of luck.

The meeting of preparation with opportunity generates the offspring we call luck.

You gotta try your luck at least once a day, because you could be going around lucky all day and not even know it.

Give luck a chance to happen.

And I always found that the harder I worked, the better my luck was, because I was prepared for that.