Zubin Mehta

“I have a few homes, and Los Angeles is certainly one of them.”

“The 'New York Times' reviews of my work have been evenly divided - favourable and unfavourable.”

“I am always hearing from Israelis, 'Oh, CNN is anti-Israel,' or 'BBC is against us.' But no, they are reporting facts.”

“There are certainly talented instrumentalists coming from India. I see them performing all over the world.”

“There is a school in Israel called Hand in Hand which I support. There Arab and Jewish students study together on a daily basis.”

“I have had bullets flying at concerts, but I don't want to talk about that.”

“There are three orchestras in Munich, all world-quality, in a city of one million. Yet every hall is full.”

“I wish that only three residents of Tel Aviv could see what conditions on the West Bank are like. Living in such proximity, most Israelis have no idea about the adversity on the West Bank.”

“New York for a long time was a kind of conductor's graveyard.”

“It seems always to have been difficult to have been a New York Philharmonic conductor because of the nature of New York. We are in direct competition with the great orchestras in the world who come to play in our hall or in Carnegie, and we are constantly compared. I think that 's a good thing.”

“All these people who scream about Kashmir being an armed camp are in fact responsible for keeping it that way.”

“I've known Pinchas Zukerman since he was a teenager.”

“I'm hopeful that Israelis can go to Ramallah whenever they want and see how the people are living.”

“My father was a trained accountant, a BCom from Sydenham College and a self-taught violinist. In the 1920s, when he was in his teens, he heard a great violinist, Jascha Heifetz, and he was so inspired listening to him that he bought himself a violin, and with a little help from an Italian teacher, he learned to play it.”

“In truth, I became a conductor because deep down I wanted to conduct Brahms's four symphonies and Richard Strauss's tone poems.”

“Music is the message of peace, and music only brings peace.”

“New York is really the place to be; to go to New York, you're going to the center of the world, the lion's den.”

“My life is so full of sacrifices.”

“I respect the Indian government for the fact that there are no settlements in Kashmir.”

“It's hard to find an emblem of cultural, national pride that burns as bright as Israel's success in classical music.”