Quotes from Simon Rattle

As a Liverpool boy, it is impossible not to think of the Beatles' question, 'Will you still need me when I'm 64?'

With these big Wagner pieces, if I haven't started three years before, I'm screwed. You need time to look at the piece again and again and again, and then, like some fantastic casserole or spaghetti sauce, put it back in the fridge and let the flavours get together.

Learning music is a birthright. And you have to start young.

I've always loved French music. My parents adored it; my father played it on the piano.

'Pelleas et Melisande' is one of the saddest and most upsetting operas ever written. If you love the opera as I do, then you love it to pieces, obsessively.

Nobody has Francis Bacon on their walls in their house - or very few people - but sometimes people listen to Beethoven as though it was background and a comfort, and I think that is very dangerous.

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

You would never train people to play football by telling them to watch football. You make them play football.

Liverpool is off the side of the known universe, and it always was. New York is the only other place comparable.

It's interesting: composers can be very funny ducks.

Conductors start getting good when everybody else retires.

In my mid-twenties, I was with a conducting career, but I had never been to university and I wanted to. There were things I wanted to study in depth. I also wanted to see if I could survive without music.

One of the most difficult things in opera is for people to suspend disbelief.

I first heard Mahler's second symphony aged 11 in Liverpool, and it inspired me to become a conductor.

I'd be much more likely to watch the latest Tarantino movie than to listen to a Mahler symphony.

The music lovers of London and the country deserve to have something where orchestras can flourish. You have no idea how wonderful an orchestra like the London Symphony Orchestra can sound in a great concert hall.

In England, unless I am mistaken, I think some of the politicians who love classical music and opera are a bit loath to be seen there in case people think it is elitist. That is a real shame because it also means we are not allowing our politicians a hinterland that an earlier generation, a Denis Healey, would have taken for granted.

I am old enough to remember the enormous fight over Tate Modern. It is such a part of our cultural landscape now, we forget the opposition to it.

As a nation, we English tend to be self-deprecating, looking down on ourselves. We're insular but also flexible, whereas in Germany, it's a case of besser wissen - we know better. That's very Deutsch. People are never frightened to tell you what you're doing wrong, in a way that would never happen in England.

Oh Lord... I don't really do pride.

We have to be evangelists for music. We couldn't just be high priests of music.

I believe if you're not completely in love with what you're doing, you'd better find another profession.

The grapevine in England is an extraordinary thing. When there is a really brilliant young composer or soloist, we all hear about it.

I was a harpsichordist in my teens, and there was a bunch of us in Liverpool who got together every week to play Bach.