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

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.

Great success in examinations does naturally not as a rule go with originality of thought.

Achievement is not always success, while reputed failure often is. It is honest endeavor, persistent effort to do the best possible under any and all circumstances.

After my spectacular failures, I could not be satisfied with an ordinary success.

Some of the best lessons we ever learn are learned from past mistakes. The error of the past is the wisdom and success of the future.

The secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people.

I define success as being comfortable with yourself and your life. And that is about as good as it gets, really.

No one is guaranteed happiness. You can pursue it, but if you happen to find success along the way on that road to happiness, Conservatives believe you should not be demonized or penalized for it.

PR is extremely important, and being able to use it in the right way means everything. You have to market your success.

I sort of understood that when I first started: that you shouldn't repeat a success. Very often you're going to, and maybe the first time you do, it works. And you love it. But then you're trapped.

The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.

Success requires first expending ten units of effort to produce one unit of results. Your momentum will then produce ten units of results with each unit of effort.

When I meet successful people I ask 100 questions as to what they attribute their success to. It is usually the same: persistence, hard work and hiring good people.

It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

The key to accepting responsibility for your life is to accept the fact that your choices, every one of them, are leading you inexorably to either success or failure, however you define those terms.

All business success rests on something labeled a sale, which at least momentarily weds company and customer.

Success is sweet and sweeter if long delayed and gotten through many struggles and defeats.

There's no such thing as an overnight success. It took me a long to get there.

The secret to my success is that I bit off more than I could chew and chewed as fast as I could.

Our brave soldiers and support personnel are engaged in a battle as important as any the United States has ever before waged, for the success of democracy in Iraq is a crucial test of the ideals this Nation was founded upon.

With the success of the last three or so years, when a lot of people start treating you differently, there's a danger that you may start to think of yourself differently. You rely on your friends to say, 'Hey, wake up!'

I attribute my success to this - I never gave or took any excuse.

A government for the people must depend for its success on the intelligence, the morality, the justice, and the interest of the people themselves.

And I, uh, I wonder how anybody can think his personality changes with his success. I've had quite a bit of success but I feel that I'm just the same person as I always was.