Esa-Pekka Salonen Quotes

Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living.

I've realized that I love all forms of music and get excited when any artist goes crazy and creates something that is an experience.

New materials are one of the great afflictions of contemporary art. Some artists confuse new materials with new ideas.

We all have to open our minds, stretch forth, take chances and venture out musically to try and arrive at something new and different.

Sometimes as an artist when things come easy to you, you look for other avenues that are more challenging to you and you try to walk those lanes.

When you play Bach like Chopin, and Chopin like Bach, something good happens.

My goal is to create a therapy of ideas, to try to bring in new ideas so that we can see the same old problems differently.

I like making movies. I like the process. I like trying out new ideas, and if they don't work, they don't work. That's the reason I generated the money in the first place, to be able to try things. That's where I spend my money.

I'm a text artist. It's an unsung art form because it's so ahead of its time.

My interest in making music has been to create something that does not exist that I would like to listen to. I wanted to hear music that had not yet happened, by putting together things that suggested a new thing which did not yet exist.

In a weird way, riffing on genres is kind of a reaction to formula. When you watch so much of the programmers and the films that you just think you've seen before, it's kind of going back to the well in terms of trying to conjure up the spirit of what made you excited about films in the first place.

I'm very conscious of the idea of trying to each time present something that I haven't presented before. It's a challenge to me to find something new, to find something innovative, but it's also very exciting.

I don't consider myself a musician who has achieved perfection and can't develop any further. But I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself. Take a musician like John Coltrane. He is a perfect musician, who can give expression to all the possibilities of his instrument. But he seems to have difficulty expressing original ideas on it. That is why he keeps looking for ideas in exotic places. At least I don't have that problem, because, like I say, I find my inspiration in myself.

If I begin writing a poem that means I'm intrigued in some way by whatever it's about and that if I'm not trying to find something new and pushing the envelope in the poem I can't expect my reader to be particularly excited about it either.

I switched up so that I could work 12-hour shifts at the firm on the weekends so I could have days free to paint. But it was almost like I had a secret life, because I wasn't showing any of my work. It was just in my house. In '89, I got a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. That's when I started to get into group shows. Suddenly I sort of "came out" as an artist.

When I think of Boris Diaw, I think of Beethoven in the age of the romantics

I've been writing as long as I've been able to form words. I never wrote with an idea of publishing anything until I began working on '[To Kill a] Mockingbird'. I think that what went before may have been a rather subconscious form of learning how to write, of training myself.

I never went to art school and I never thought of going to an art school. It was just a way of manifesting these ideas I had. Ideas came to me that I needed to express.

My journals were a clearing house - a garbage can. Once I was writing seriously, I understood that this was the stuff that didn't belong in my work.

Anton Bruckner wrote the same symphony nine times, trying to get it just right. He failed.

Photography was the medium preeminently qualified to unite art with science. Photography was born in the years which ushered in the scientific age, an offspring of both science and art.

I'm going to be a better actor, or I'm going to try to be a better actor. I'm going to try to be a better musician. I'm going to be an artist instead of just this one thing.

Everyone wants a definition of creativity that makes what they do into something special and what everyone else does into nothing special. But the fact is, we're all creative. We come up with weird and interesting ideas all the time. The biggest difference between 'creators' isn't their imagination - it's how hard they work. Ideas are easy. Doing stuff is hard.

The orchestra's an amazing instrument, but I don't want to just arrange my songs for it. I think that might be kind of boring and a little bit overdramatic, perhaps. I'm still just having too much fun doing it my way, for the time being.

I think the arts should get big support, but my country has a lot of needs more important than film. Medication, education, food... The poverty is overwhelming. There are simply more important things to be attended to.