Quotes from Joshua Bell

I don't want to portray myself as a daredevil. I'm not at all.

As my career has gone on, I guess I've become more well known. I'm playing to fuller halls in general, which is a nice feeling. When you're doing that, you're going to have a certain number of people who are not just the hardcore classical fanatics, and this makes me very happy.

It's endless, the amount of things that music touches on that can help kids grow that are very, very practical.

In a way, the highest praise you could give to a composer like Bach was to take and make your own arrangement; it was sort of an homage to that composer and to his work, so it wasn't considered sacrilegious to do something like that.

You're really looking for the truth of what the piece is about. And that's going to be different for different people.

Conducting is a strange thing to teach.

My teacher, Josef Gingold, a student of the French school, always loved the music of Saint-Saens and Henri Vieuxtemps and all the French repertoire.

Conducting is a strange thing to teach. There are very few great conducting teachers, and most great conductors don't teach. Look at Valery Gergiev - what he does is not teachable. A lot of it is on-the-job training, what works and what doesn't work.

As far as I'm concerned, the stakes are always very high. Whether it's playing at the White House or playing for a group in my own house - you know, one of those soirees I play in. Once I start playing, the stakes are somehow higher, in a way, than any of the context.

As far as doing TV, I do think there's a big audience out there that could enjoy classical music, but they don't know how to find it, and sometimes by doing different things... crossover things probably make up about 5% of what I do.

I was lucky enough to have parents who started me on music very early, but most kids don't get that kind of exposure.

So many times, I've seen conductors that, every time they have a thought, they stop the orchestra and say it, and I can see the orchestra rolling their eyes and saying, 'Oh, God, he stopped again.' So there's a technique to rehearsing.

No one tells you what to do if you completely flop at the beginning of a performance.

In art and music, particularly in the 20th century, there was a big period there where for something to be called profound you had to not be able to understand it.

Bach's music is really some of the greatest. I think, in some ways, Bach is the most profound composer of all.

The beauty of a Stradivarius is that you can play in Carnegie Hall without any amplification, and it has this - the sound has, inside it, has something that projects, and it has multifaceted sound, something that kind of gets lost when you use amplification anyway.

We live in a very chaotic world that sometimes we - it just seems like a mess. One of the reasons why we listen to music, and to great classical music in particular, is that everything is in an order and in a place and has a beauty that you see in nature, that you see and that people look for when they look for God.

When I do things, like, with Josh Grobin, or he has so many fans, and I get people after my concerts, classical concerts, all the time coming back and saying, 'Never heard of you until I heard the song with Josh Grobin.' Then they're now classical music fans, which is something I think we need to reach a wider audience.

A conductor can do wild things which can feel forced, but if you're directing from within the orchestra, you can't do that, things have to feel natural.

I'm in a position where, theoretically, I could play the same ten concertos and make a very good living bouncing around playing Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky and Barber, but I really think artists should keep pushing limits and trying new things.

I like blackjack. I like the psychology of poker.

I never had any real expectations about what sort of success I would have or all the publicity.

Good conductors know when to push and when to lay back. I've known so many great conductors that I'm still doing what I can to learn the craft of this role.

I started directing chamber orchestras, then adding bigger pieces, adding winds, adding small symphonies. I've always loved chamber music, and I've done a lot.