Esa-Pekka Salonen Quotes

As I told a friend of mine once who asked me why I joined Mercury, I think if I had been alive 150 years ago, I might have wanted to go out and help open up the West.

Well, I like to be kept on my toes. I look for a challenge. I don't like to recreate steps that I've already walked. I like to see if I can create something new.

Life is not shrinking for me; it's morphing into a whole new world of possibilities.

The West was a wonderful world to me. I decided then that if this is the way they did things, then I wanted to be part of it.

I'm always looking for something new to do.

The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.

The only way to find that territory is trying to keep your mind constantly open. That's the only way that you're ever going to see the sort of signs of where to go.

My motto is more, 'If you want to find something new, look for something new!' There is a certain amount of risk in this attitude, as even the slightest failure tends to be resounding, but you are so happy when you succeed that it is worth taking the risk.

Have fun. Do something nobody else had done before, or has done since.

I like new challenges and new experiences.

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're doing something.

We didn't build the interstate system to connect New York to Los Angeles because the West Coast was a priority. No, we webbed the highways so people can go to multiple places and invent ways of doing things not thought of by the persons building the roads.

I have always had the courage for the new things that life sometimes offers.

The coolest things in life are things that you have not done before. That's the key to life: new things always.

You can't stumble upon something new and wonderful if you don't have time to stumble.

A lot of the stories I was brought up on had to do with extreme actions - leaving everything behind, crossing the trackless wastes, and in those stories the people who stayed behind and had their settled ways - those people were not the people who got the prize. The prize was California.

I like challenges, I like that fear you feel for something new, and with a new director, I think it's very important to always support new projects.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. And venture belongs to the adventurous.

The West has always been the epicentre of possibility. One of the ways we forge against mortality is to head west. It's to do with catching the sun before it slips behind the horizon.

I am not afraid to be a pioneer. When a door is ajar, you need to open it fully. And once you are in that room, you need to see what other doors there might be and where they might lead.

Space only becomes ordinary when the frontier is no longer being breached.

In my career the push has always been to take another step, to try something new.

My favourite words are possibilities, opportunities and curiosity. I think if you are curious, you create opportunities, and then if you open the doors, you create possibilities.

After doing so many different roles, if you don't stretch yourself, there's no excitement left.

So, I decided that whatever I was, wanted to do with my life, it would have to do, it would have to have something to do with the exploration and doing new things.