Simon Rattle

“I think Beethoven means dissonances to be more stressed than consonances - it's the shock tactician in him.”

“Some of my favorite music in the world is Haydn. I had a sabbatical one year and made myself one promise: to play a different Haydn piano sonata each day - they are inexhaustible treasures.”

“As an older dad you can certainly get down on the floor. The problem is can you get up again?”

“The grapevine in England is an extraordinary thing. When there is a really brilliant young composer or soloist, we all hear about it.”

“It's interesting: composers can be very funny ducks.”

“Nobody has Francis Bacon on their walls in their house - or very few people - but sometimes people listen to Beethoven as though it was background and a comfort, and I think that is very dangerous.”

“With these big Wagner pieces, if I haven't started three years before, I'm screwed. You need time to look at the piece again and again and again, and then, like some fantastic casserole or spaghetti sauce, put it back in the fridge and let the flavours get together.”

“American economists can't understand the German fear of inflation and the effects of inflation when dealing with the world economic crisis. They wonder why Germany pursues such a different course - 'Why can't they agree with us?' I would have thought it was fairly obvious.”

“You would never train people to play football by telling them to watch football. You make them play football.”

“My only interest is in sharing great music with more and more people.”

“I love Mozart, but I often make a terrible hash of it.”

“There are a few great orchestras in the world, thank goodness. Although some people do put them in ranking order, it's not like a snooker match. Each orchestra has different things to offer.”

“The music lovers of London and the country deserve to have something where orchestras can flourish. You have no idea how wonderful an orchestra like the London Symphony Orchestra can sound in a great concert hall.”

“We have to be evangelists for music. We couldn't just be high priests of music.”

“The better the orchestra, often the harder it is to conduct, not the other way around.”

“'Pelleas et Melisande' is one of the saddest and most upsetting operas ever written. If you love the opera as I do, then you love it to pieces, obsessively.”

“Always the journey, never the destination.”

“I'd be much more likely to watch the latest Tarantino movie than to listen to a Mahler symphony.”

“Passionate musicians only come from passionate five-year-olds.”

“One of the most extraordinary and all-encompassing forms of communication is music. It reaches places that all kinds of other things cannot reach. I'll put my cards on the table: I think it is our greatest language.”