Esa-Pekka Salonen Quotes

I personally don't even try to compare New York and L.A. To me, they are just way too different.

It's hard for it to make a mark in this city because London has so much culture to offer.

The streets of Vienna are paved with culture, the streets of other cities with asphalt.

It's just strange to think that so much of our enjoyment from sports comes from the elevation of arbitrary differences.

Belgrade is the ugliest city in the world in the most beautiful place in the world.

Presidents and presidential assassins are like Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. Even though one city is all about sin and the other is all about salvation, they are identical, one-dimensional company towns built up by the sheer will of true believers.

Every man for himself.

There is such a difference between the pursuits of men in great cities that one part of the inhabitants lives to little other purpose than to wonder at the rest. Some have hopes and fears, wishes and aversions, which never enter into the thoughts of others, and inquiry is laboriously exerted to gain that which those who possess it are ready to throw away.

I never dreamed I'd like any city as well as London. San Francisco is exciting, moody, exhilarating. I even love the muted fogs.

A man ought to get all he can earn. A man who knows he's making money for other people ought to get some of the profit he brings in. Don't make any difference if it's baseball or a bank or a vaudeville show. It's business, I tell you. There ain't no sentiment to it. Forget that stuff.

This will be my first Grand Slam final without Roger Federer or Novak Djokovic on the other side of the net, but I don't think being the more experienced player will make much difference to my approach.

If we are going to out-innovate, out-compete, out-educate other countries, it's going to be women who make a difference, it's women who are going to lead the way and you know, until women get that rightful place and decision making and leadership and growth, America won't realize all her potential.

I'm a London fanatic. That's my city. I love being from there, you don't appreciate it until you go out.

Wherever there’s a conductor, you’re sure to find a dead composer!

If one is looking for cultural testosterone and raging off-the-wall competition in the world of communications, Manhattan was - and is - home plate.

New York: Prison towers and modern posters for soap and whiskey. Pittsburgh: Abandon it.

I think the other thing that's important is getting to a place, which very, very rarely happens with improvising groups, where somebody can decide not to play for a while. You watch any group of musicians improvising together and they nearly all play nearly all the time. In fact I often say that the biggest difference between classical music and everything else is that classical musicians sometimes shut up because they're told to, because the score tells them to. Whereas any music that's sort of based on folk or jazz, everybody plays all the time.

High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor, only to be surpassed by his successor. Without this relay race called history there would be no European art and what characterizes it: a longing for originality, a longing for change. Robespierre, Napoleon, Beethoven, Stalin, Picasso, they're all runners in the relay race, they all belong to the same stadium.

If anything can be invented more excruciating than an English Opera, such as was the fashion at the time I was in London, I am sure no sin of mine deserves the punishment of bearing it.

If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That's Always Passed Out on the Couch.

Obviously, raw talent is important, but the difference-maker between first and the rest of the pack is usually desire.

I don't know where there can be so many pianists as in Paris, so many asses and so many virtuosi.

Hip-hop is a competition culture. It's based around, "My DJ is better than you. My graffiti artist is better than you."

London ... remains a man's city where New York is chiefly a woman's. London has whole streets that cater to men's wants. It has its great solid phalanx of fortress clubs.

Venice is a cheek-by-jowl, back-of-the-hand, under-the-counter, higgledy-piggledy, anecdotal city, and she is rich in piquant wrinkled things, like an assortment of bric-a-brac in the house of a wayward connoisseur, or parasites on an oyster-shell.