Esa-Pekka Salonen Quotes

When I said I no longer wanted to be a painter, that I wanted to be an actor, the first thing I did was get a stinking job in an insurance building.

With Dream Theater, every creative aspect of the group went through me. I oversaw it all from top to bottom.

I arrived in the U.S. for graduate study in literature in the fall of 1986. I was twenty-three. After a year, I began to paint, even though I had come to the U.S. intending to become a writer.

I have done the company lifestyle for 16 years, and ballet has changed.

I didn't plan to be a director until I was 35. For years I wanted to do anything but!

I like to create the music I hear in my interior. As a conductor, you have the ability to squeeze the sounds and interpretation you asked for from 50 to 80 people.

I had played sports all my life, and I thought that was going to be the way. But I saw where the potential in football was going to end. When it comes to decision-making, I just follow my gut at the end of the day. And if I don't, I get in trouble. I wanted to become a filmmaker.

I'm fascinated by people who have to reinvent themselves. I did it a few times - I was going to be a physicist before I was passionate about philosophy - and I realized that one more change, and I'm going to start looking like a dilettante.

I certainly never pictured myself even attending the Academy Awards, much less winning at 56. I very, very happily settled into a theater career. I did more than that, but I let all of my agents and people go. I said, 'I don't want to be promoted in film anymore. I have enough to do in the theater, so I'm just going to carry on.'

I was never really interested in an operatic post, but I took on the Bastille because it seemed a unique opportunity to build an opera ensemble from scratch, and to deal with all the disciplines that go into opera - the music, the staging and the singing - in an interrelated way.

At Kobe, whither I fled from Hong Kong, I took a step of great importance. I cut off my cue, which had been growing all my life.

I stopped acting, as I was not curious about it anymore. I was not passionate about acting.

I initially moved to Bombay to work in the corporate space. After settling my family here in due course of time, I turned to acting which initially started off as a hobby that I wanted to pursue on the side and then became my profession to sustain my passion around five years back.

For me, the most difficult move was when I chose to quit modelling and applied for a position of an assistant director.

Isn't composing music akin to film direction?

I will move to Dera, Beas, post-transitioning my executive responsibilities at Fortis.

I went to NYU thinking I was going to make a 'Die Hard' sequel, or maybe action and genre films for the studios, but I ended up falling in love with personal cinema.

I equate composing with orchestrating. I think my music in terms of an orchestra.

When I started, I'd never had a conducting lesson in my life; I could just do it.

I was the laziest person around. Suddenly, one day, I decided to become an actor. Thank God for that whimsical decision: else, by now, I'd have been a 140-kilo, butter-chicken-bingeing hotelier.

I would have never thought when I was a young actor that I would want to direct.

I am an engineer by profession, but I knew I wanted to act. My parents always encouraged me, and when my father shifted to Mumbai for work for a brief while, I came along.

The transition from soccer to fashion was an organic one.

The music of Bach is so timeless, so fulfilling. You don't feel like you have to be in front of it. The music has everything, and you are there to find the balance when you conduct. You don't have to give too much of your individuality. It's Bach, so it's dangerous to get in the way.

I have never even considered a future outside the walls of the WWE. However, sometimes life takes an unexpected turn, and while it is the most difficult decision I have ever made, it is time for me to move on.