Leonard Bernstein

"To Bach, notes were not just sounds but the very stuff of creation."

"The trouble with you and me, Ned, is that we want everyone in the world to personally love us, and of course that's impossible; you just don't meet everyone in the world."

"Perhaps the chief requirement of is that he be humble before the composer; that he never interpose himself between the music and the audience; that all his efforts, however strenuous or glamorous, be …"

"Any great work of art … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world — the extent to which it invites you in and …"

"A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future."

"The 20th century has been a badly written drama, from the beginning. The opposite of a Greek drama. Act one: Greed and hypocrisy leading to a genocidal world war, a boom, a crash, totalitarianism. Act…"

"Callas? She was pure electricity."

"The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together — with a thin paste of flour and water… I don’t think there has been such an inspired melodist on this ear…"