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.

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.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Don't let ambition get so far ahead that it loses sight of the job at hand.

The truth is really an ambition which is beyond us.

Ambition can be a disease, and it feeds on itself.

My craziest ambition is to take John Madden's job and salary.

There has to be this pioneer, the individual who has the courage, the ambition to overcome the obstacles that always develop when one tries to do something worthwhile, especially when it is new and different.

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

I'm just a ballplayer with one ambition, and that is to give all I've got to help my ball club win. I've never played any other way.

Ambition has one heel nailed in well, though she stretch her fingers to touch the heavens.

People in the U.K. cannot understand whether Blair has lost his mind or whether his ambition to be the second-most-powerful man in the world made him lose his mind.

One thing all stage mothers share is an overpowering ambition for their daughters.

Moderation has been called a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to console undistinguished people for their want of fortune and their lack of merit.

Me only have one ambition, y'know. I only have one thing I really like to see happen. I like to see mankind live together - black, white, Chinese, everyone - that's all.

You want the book to be special, and they are not always going to be special, but at least you want that to be the ambition. So the only way that happens is if you are not pressing to write a book.

The average Hollywood film star's ambition is to be admired by an American, courted by an Italian, married to an Englishman and have a French boyfriend.

I should have been smart enough to stay happy. But my ambition ruled my life.

Great ambition, the desire of real superiority, of leading and directing, seems to be altogether peculiar to man, and speech is the great instrument of ambition.

God like Us suffers the ambition to make a destiny more extraordinary than was conceived for Him, yes God is like Me, only more so.

I used to think I had ambition... but now I'm not so sure. It may have been only discontent. They're easily confused.

A young man without ambition is an old man waiting to be.

The preserve of ambition and folly in pursuit of illusion, or delusion.