What I never overcame is a kind of shyness.

I always imagined that to bring an orchestra to play together is not enough for a conductor.

Since the composer has said everything, if you discover everything, it will be enough and you will be a happy man. Don't try to say it's your taste, and because of that you are changing this or that. And I must say this respect is still there.

I wouldn't say I've changed my mind. I changed some of my natural habits, some of my natural character.

And to understand this, I think this is a most important point where I would like always to be understood what we do with the New York Philharmonic. That the meaning of the music is number one.

The message of music was also the first thing what I learned from my first teacher. She was an organist too and she was very devoted to what she played, so she had a respect for every piece and she felt that she is not allowed to add something of her own.

I believe so, but at first he must know. He must know in which spirit Beethoven has composed this piece. He must try to study that. And he must find out in which station of life of Beethoven he did.

I was different from most young conductors today.

If you go to Japan for instance, you should know that they have a different way of playing Beethoven or Brahms. But if you play with them Mozart, Debussy, Mendelssohn, they have a wonderful light feeling for that.

Young conductors who are confident enough, they very often have success.

You know as I started as a shy young conductor, I always wanted to cooperate. To build up the musicians. To help them to be better than without a conductor. And sometimes young talented musicians have to be encouraged.

And if you are strong enough, then you can grow as a conductor more and more.

I can go in front of an orchestra. I can go in front of an audience. But if you see me walking through an audience in the reception or through a lot of people, I'm still shy.

In South America, I heard the 8th Symphony of Beethoven. And the young conductor thought, Beethoven must be heroic. But this is piece which shouldn't be heroic. And this was such a misunderstanding, such a deep misunderstanding.

At the age of 16, something happened with my finger and the doctor told me, you never can be a organist or pianist, so think about what you do with music.

You have to change your mind with every orchestra because every orchestra has a different character.

Even my family laughed at me because they thought this young guy who's always stuttering in front of other people should be in front of 100 musicians and talk to them and leading them.

And I always tried to be not a star. To be someone who people like to talk to.

What I never overcame is a kind of shyness.

An orchestra full of stars can be a disaster.

Even I had no opportunity to conduct very many concerts after World War II.

And at the same time, I had my very first concert at the age of 16. I hadn't heard a symphony orchestra before, and I was so deeply impressed I said I have to be a conductor.

I worked on scores. I went to the musical library in Berlin which is very famous. I discovered that we had scores of Beethoven, printed scores of Beethoven, that are full of mistakes. Not the wrong or false notes, but the wrong dynamic, understandable things.

As I came to New York, it was for me a new beginning. To discover what people are living here. What do they need, what do they expect, what would they like to be the image and the performance of the New York Philharmonic?

Very often, if I know the orchestra doesn't know a piece or it's a new piece, I have main ideas about it. But then we start to play and I never talk about places where they played so beautiful and so clear in the beginning that there is nothing to say.

Sometimes if you have very confident people, you have to tell them please, be polite, there are other players are good enough as you and you should never speak out of an orchestra.

Many a man is praised for his reserve and so-called shyness when he is simply too proud to risk making a fool of himself.

I think we all have blocks between us and the best version of ourselves, whether it's shyness, insecurity, anxiety, whether it's a physical block, and the story of a person overcoming that block to their best self. It's truly inspiring because I think all of us are engaged in that every day.

I think I had a shyness about me, I think I discovered acting as a way to break out of that and as a way of belonging, a sense of being special.

You know what my greatest personal stumbling block is? My shyness.

I started studying shyness in adults in 1972. Shyness operates at so many different levels. Out of that research came the Stanford shyness clinic in 1977.

Shyness is just egoism out of its depth.

Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.

The level of shyness has gone up dramatically in the last decade. I think shyness is an index of social pathology rather than a pathology of the individual.

I genuinely enjoy talking one-to-one. I have no shyness about that.

What troubles me is the Internet and the electronic technology revolution. Shyness is fueled in part by so many people spending huge amounts of time alone, isolated on e-mail, in chat rooms, which reduces their face-to-face contact with other people.

I was passionate. I found something that I loved. I could be all alone in a big old skating rink and nobody could get near me and I didn't have to talk to anybody because of my shyness. It was great. I was in my fantasy world.

What I never overcame is a kind of shyness.

In talking, shyness and timidity distort the very meaning of my words. I don't pretend to know anybody well. People are like shadows to me and I am like a shadow.

Scientists have found the gene for shyness. They would have found it years ago, but it was hiding behind a couple of other genes.

There is a shyness about me, and I really need to get out more.

I've gotten better at not making people feel uncomfortable with my shyness.

When you look at magazines, you feel so inadequate and so small and you feel really imperfect, when you're constantly seeing these images.

I play rec softball sort of religiously. I'm a huge baseball fan. When I lived in New York City, I'd go to a Yankees game every week.

Talking up a storm about food is so easy for me, it's second nature.

A rational model of software is to design it quickly - the economic pressure to improvise presents an interesting challenge.

I remember bossing my younger siblings around and making them put on shows and skits with me.

I don't really use the Internet or the newspapers to find out about people.

The Savior can wipe away our tears of regret.