Esa-Pekka Salonen Quotes

I'm composing more than before. I'm cutting down on conducting.

There will have to be times when I'm not conducting because I'm composing. I haven't solved that problem, and perhaps I never will.

I'm constantly fighting with my manager to reduce the amount of time I have to spend on promotional activities, so I can get back in the studio and work on new music.

One had better not rush, otherwise dung comes out rather than creative work.

In the year 2000 you're going to have a problem...Leisure time will be a problem in the year 2000. I just want you to realize, I just want to make sure that you know of it now.

I spent 80% of my time working on this, and 20% of my time working on music. Why do you think the song 'Niggas in Paris' is called 'Niggas in Paris?' 'Cause niggas was in Paris!

I bring people on to the movies to type and to help punch up and look at things. But a lot of it is, you want fun people to be around, to put you in a good mood, to try and access your creative place.

Everybody just tries to be successful. Like, sure, it's good to be successful, but if you're working that hard? This is how I feel, I work so many hours a day, and I'm always working, I'm always traveling.

Every day when everybody would have lunch I would do TM [Transcendental Meditation] and then I would eat while I was working because I had missed lunch but that is how I survived the 9 years [of Seinfeld], it was that 20 minutes in the middle of the day would save me.

You have to be able to do a bunch of things at once, and not think about things you're not doing while you're doing other things. You have to be disciplined about not trying to do everything, all at the same time. It's hard and fun.

I'm always just trying to get the work done so that I can be free - like, with the sense that, like, the real me has no interest in this? I just gotta do it for my boss. But the catch is that I'm never free, I never finish the work, so I don't know who this freewheeling employee with extracurricular interests is.

When my children were very young and I was working I had someone cooking for me. I don't have a cook now, I haven't had one for a number of years and I do it myself. But when they were all little it was hard to pay attention to everyone's homework at the end of the day and make dinner.

Films don't take as long as people think. 'Harry Potter,' people always used to say, 'Well, my God, do you ever get any time to yourself?' I think I did, in 'Harry Potter,' over a 12 year period I did five days. So it's not exactly exhausting.

If you love your work, I'm not sure you have hobbies. I try to say no to things that other people could do and only say yes to things that only I could do.

You know, there has never been a 24-hour period in five years when I have not responded to e-mail at Facebook. I am not saying it's easy. I work long hours.

Two-thirds of my energies go in trying to save one-third for work.

I'm actually really lazy. I tell myself, "Okay, you work six months out of the year and you have to get up at 4 a.m. ..." I'll relish the downtime by chilling on the couch and watching my favorite TV shows.

People say they don't have time to cook, yet in the last few years we have found an extra two hours a day for the internet.

Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.

Just balancing all the different projects, I mean I spent almost 10 years just doing Nasty Gal and I say "just" but that was a lot, and it's still a lot.

When I lived in New York, there wasn't as much TV or film around. I got asked to do a couple of indie films, just based on me being from The Smashing Pumpkins and A Perfect Circle. I did a couple of indie movies from Japan and one from Canada, and I thought it was an exciting, fun thing to do. I had a great time doing it, it was just that, in New York, there really wasn't as much. My studio in New York closed, so I moved out to L.A. and just started looking into composing as another thing to do, as a musician. I like it a lot. It's fun and it's a different way of thinking about music.

My first company was MicroSolutions. I worked 20 hours a day. I didn't take a vacation for 7 years. I didn't even take the time to read a fiction book. It was all about work. When I sold it, I promised myself I would never wear a watch and only wear a suit to weddings, funerals and to meet the President.

Composing is like making love to the future.

Who will free me from hurry, flurry, the feeling of a crowd pushing behind me, of being hustled and crushed? How can I regain even for a minute the feeling of ample leisure I had during my early, my creative years? Then I seldom felt fussed, or hurried. There was time for work, for play, for love, the confidence that if a task was not done at the appointed time, I easily could fit it into another hour. I used to take leisure for granted, as I did time itself.