DANIEL BARENBOIM

I love conducting. What I'm tired of is music administration. I don't want that. I just want to make music.

Anti-Semitism has no historical, political and certainly no philosophical origins. Anti-Semitism is a disease.

It is always interesting and sometimes even important to have intimate knowledge of a composer's life, but it is not essential in order to understand the composer's works.

I have music in my brain all the time, all sorts.

There are many types of silence. There is a silence before the note, there is a silence at the end and there is a silence in the middle.

In my mother's belly, I remember not liking the tempi my father played the Beethoven Sonatas in.

Beethoven was a deeply political man in the broadest sense of the word. He was not interested in daily politics, but concerned with questions of moral behaviour and the larger questions of right and wrong affecting the entire society.

Music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments of his life.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

To have real knowledge, one must understand the essence of things and not only their manifestations.

In the beginning, there was silence. And out of the silence came the sound. The sound is not here.

For many people, music is here to let them forget the daily chores of life.

When you love somebody and they die young and you are young, too, it is very hard.

Once you start playing a piece, there is a connection between every note. You cannot say, 'I will not concentrate on this note.' You cannot ignore things the way you do in the rest of your life.

Now the first step has to be taken, the step towards democracy. This step is full of risks, and requires trust on all sides. We don't know where it will lead. But if we just stand still, we will have no chance of escaping the violence.

I liked very much when we lived in Hampstead. We would go for walks on the Heath. I liked it better than living in the centre of town.

I maintain music is not here to make us forget about life. It's also here to teach us about life: the fact that everything starts and ends, the fact that every sound is in danger of disappearing, the fact that everything is connected - the fact that we live and we die.

Jewish intellectuals contributed a great deal to insure that Europe became a continent of humanism, and it is with these humanist ideals that Europe must now intervene in the Middle East conflict.

There are wonderful restaurants in London. I love Indian food and I like Arab food, and I go very often to the Arab restaurant Noura.

Beethoven's importance in music has been principally defined by the revolutionary nature of his compositions. He freed music from hitherto prevailing conventions of harmony and structure.

I can't stand going out to one more dinner with some Mrs. So-and-So who might leave a million dollars to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when she dies.

What the world is saying to us human beings is, 'Don't stick to the old ways, learn to think anew.' And that's what musicians do every day.

Sound is often talked about in a very subjective way, as if it had a colour. This is a bright sound, this is a dark sound. I don't believe in that because I think that is much too subjective.

Tradition demands that we not speak poorly of the dead.

When playing music, it is possible to achieve a unique sense of peace.