In our culture we have such respect for musical instruments, they are like part of God.

In our culture we have such respect for musical instruments, they are like part of God.

My secret ambition was always to provide music for animation films: something with an Indian theme, either a fairy tale or mythological tale or on the Krishna theme. I still have a very deep desire, but these sorts of chances don't always come.

Everybody has a right to like or dislike anything or anyone. From a flower to a flavor to a book or a composition but it is very sad that in our country we actually fight over such things in an unseemly manner.

Pop changes week to week, month to month. But great music is like literature.

I believe in one thing: that anyone who is able to do something good for someone, I mean, should be praised.

I don't appreciate avant-garde, electronic music. It makes me feel quite ill.

I enjoy seeing other Indian musicians - old and young - coming to Europe and America and having some success. I'm happy to have contributed to that.

I have always had an instinct for doing new things. Call it good or bad, I love to experiment.

I have great difficulty sitting in the middle of the night and writing. Everything I do comes spontaneous. Sometimes it takes a long time; sometimes it comes just like that.

I love the work of Matisse and Picasso, but I don't have enough millions to own one. And I don't really believe in owning art, anyway.

I started out as a dancer, but gradually became more interested in music.

I think musicians and actors have all these problems, because of the popularity and the opportunity.

I try to give to my music the spiritual quality, very deep in the soul, which does something even if you are not realizing it or analyzing it - that's the duty of the music.

I was invited for the first Woodstock. Actually, I started the programme.

I will keep playing as long as my body lets me, and as long as I'm wanted by my listeners. Because music is the only thing that keeps me going.

In India, I have been called a 'destroyer.' But that is only because they mixed my identity as a performer and as a composer. As a composer I have tried everything, even electronic music and avant-garde. But as a performer I am, believe me, getting more classical and more orthodox, jealously protecting the heritage that I have learned.

In the U.K., classical music is composed by individuals and written down. Indian music is based on certain sequences called ragas. When I perform live, 95% of the music is improvised: it never sounds the same twice.

In the olden days, I believe Mozart also improvised on piano, but somehow in the last 200 years, the whole training of Western classical music - they don't read between the lines, they just read the lines.

Many people, especially young people, have started listening to sitar since George Harrison, one of the Beatles, became my disciple.

My brother had a house in Paris. To it came many Western classical musicians. These musicians all made the same point: 'Indian music,' they said, 'is beautiful when we hear it with the dancers. On its own, it is repetitious and monotonous.'

My music has a very spiritual background, a sanctity that is almost like worship.

One single raga can be performed for two hours, three hours.

The music that I have learned and want to give is like worshipping God. It's absolutely like a prayer.

There are thousands of ragas, and they are all connected with different times of the day, like sunrise or night or sunset. It is all based on 72 of what we call 'mela' or scales. And we have principally nine moods, ranging from peacefulness to praying, or the feeling of emptiness you get by sitting by the ocean.

To me, you know, from my childhood I always had a fascination for United States.

When people say that George Harrison made me famous, that is true in a way.

Pop changes week to week month to month. But great music is like literature.

I believe that in a great city, or even in a small city or a village, a great theater is the outward and visible sign of an inward and probable culture.

We should have a State in which we could live and breathe as free men and which we could develop according to our own lights and culture and where principles of Islamic social justice could find free play.

I don't have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I'm left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct.

We need to have a culture that says 'the less energy you can use to be comfortable, the better off you are and the better you should feel about yourself'.

Concerning culture as a process, one would say that it means learning a great many things and then forgetting them; and the forgetting is as necessary as the learning.

No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion.

The things that I draw on, and the world that I feel part of, aren't particularly youth culture.

I recommend the same therapies for all humans with HIV. There is no reason to believe that physiologic responses to therapy will vary across lines of class, culture, race or nationality.

Towns are suffering from all these things, we should unite until we are all satisfied, man cannot be killing each other as if we were animals, as if we had no culture; that is a lack of culture.

You're a Catholic in Italy when you're born, it's unthinkable to stop being Catholic. You just take the rules a lot more seriously, because it pervades your culture.

Sex and drugs were simply not discussed in our culture at that time.

You have to open your mind. I like the ability to express myself in a deep way. It's the closest music to our humanity - it's like a folk music that rises up out of a culture.

Lives have been altered in fundamental ways, and later, after they acquire a more complete understanding of what goals are actually attainable, many are left facing a lot of pain and frustration. And yet, there's no culture of complaint.

I've always been interested in the relationship between total external surround, culture, the political matrix, technology, etc., and the internal human consciousness.

Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is.

And there are so many people in the third world suffering so horribly right now, and we are so focused on ourselves and our culture that a lot of things are showing up in our culture that are making it impossible for us to focus on others. We're so self-focused.

One very important aspect of our contemporary musical culture - some might say the supremely important aspect - is its extension in the historical and geographical senses to a degree unknown in the past.

Mr. Speaker, genocide is the most potent of all crimes against humanity because it is an effort to systematically wipe out a people and a culture as well as individual lives.

When I go to Japan and do shows I play for 1,000 to 1,500 people. I like a lot about Japan. Their popular culture and mass commercialization appeals to me.

The question was heatedly debated of how much Western culture should be brought into China.

The whole drive of western culture, the part of it which is serious, is towards an extreme objectification. It's carried to the point where the human subject is treated almost as if it's dirt in the works of a watch.