Quotes from Joshua Bell

I always have loved the Stradivarius. My teacher, Josef Gingold, he had a Stradivarius. As a treat, he would put it under my chin and let me play a few notes, and I remember that feeling of the overtones, the complexity of the sound. It's like a great wine.

I love the outdoor festival feeling. When I'm on stage, it's very gratifying to watch people on the lawns enjoying the music with a glass of wine.

There are some great teachers who have had great students, but they themselves can't play a note. I don't understand it, because the most I learned from my teacher was just hearing him play.

Music - you need the give and take from the audience, the feeling of attention. It's not about me: it's about the music itself.

Great music was written by the great geniuses, and you want to do it justice.

Hamburgers are my favorite thing to eat, period.

I like trying things, I am kind of adventurous and I like thrill seeking.

My whole life, I've been watching conductors. I was 7 the first time I played with a conductor. Seeing the ones that do it well, it's an amazing thing.

I want to do everything. That's my problem. Life is short, and I hate the idea of turning down anything. You never know what interesting experience might happen.

When I hear people clapping at the wrong times, I think that's great. We have got a listener that's not used to going to - we have got a new listener.

Music teaches people to work together, which is maybe one of the most important skills.

Being a director or a conductor is a balance of many things. And to do it right is a very difficult tightrope to walk. I've come to the conclusion that there's really no way to be one hundred percent popular as conductor.

Anyone who knows classical music and loves classical music has heard the Beethoven Seventh hundreds of times probably in their life.

Music is such an incredible tool for kids in general. They learn discipline; they learn how to express themselves. You learn math. You learn language. It's the ideal teaching tool, and that's why it's mind-boggling when any school superintendent decides that music is something we can kind of do without.

We live in the least ugly time in history.

It's been very exciting for me to start directing and conducting, exploring the symphonic repertoire, which I've always loved.

Art and music is part of what it means to be a human being. And if you're neglecting that, you're basically ignoring a huge side of the brain and a huge side of what it means to be human.

You don't have to have lots of love affairs to know what love is.

I love the outdoor festival feeling.

For some reason I can't explain, artist and musicians tend to look younger than our age. Being in music, you need this youthful sense of discovery and wonder for what you're doing and keep your imagination open. That's a youthful way of looking at life and I think that reflects in how you age.

It's interesting about classical music that the more you hear something, the more you get to know a piece, the better and better it gets, period, which is just an interesting thing on it.

I think you can appreciate different interpretations. Art is not a contest. I can even appreciate hearing someone play something in a way that I wouldn't.

So much of performing is a mind game. You're memorizing thousands of notes, and if you start thinking about it in the wrong way, everything can blow up in your face.

The real architecture happens within the works themselves, and that was done by the composer. That's where the real skill is. In putting together a program, you're more a curator, but that's important as well. And then the interpreting of it is where our big job is.