Quotes from Simon Rattle

As an older dad you can certainly get down on the floor. The problem is can you get up again?

One of the most extraordinary and all-encompassing forms of communication is music. It reaches places that all kinds of other things cannot reach. I'll put my cards on the table: I think it is our greatest language.

Germans have an understanding of history and cannot allow themselves to forget it. It may be a curse, but in some ways, it's a blessing. It makes them cautious.

There are a few great orchestras in the world, thank goodness. Although some people do put them in ranking order, it's not like a snooker match. Each orchestra has different things to offer.

I was thrilled that Sadiq Khan was so in support of the idea of culture being at the centre of a city and the idea that it is everyone's right. It can't be a matter of privilege or chance. It should be something everyone can have in their life, and that means knowing what it is.

Conducting 'Tristan' is like floating in amniotic fluid, but having worked on it for three months, I now know why people who go near it go so strange.

The jazz records come out a lot. You find that with many musicians - we don't listen to our own music for relaxation.

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

I've always had a profound conviction that great music is about joy, even in the face of tragedy.

'Parsifal' is one of the great examples in art of a work that transcends the personality of the man who wrote it.

Some of my favorite music in the world is Haydn. I had a sabbatical one year and made myself one promise: to play a different Haydn piano sonata each day - they are inexhaustible treasures.

Beethoven was always too much. He's not slightly anything - he's very everything.

My worst and best qualities are rashness: the good part of it is due to youth, which is, of course, why I'm not a great conductor.

If you think the music business is the be-all and end-all of life, you're in big trouble.

What really counts isn't whether your instrument is Baroque or modern: it's your mindset.

Orchestras are like people. They're the sonic embodiment of their community.

Every orchestra has its own sound.

I think we will find more and more ways in which technology invades our artistic spaces, so music is something you will need more than ever because it is there in time and in space and for that moment only.

My only interest is in sharing great music with more and more people.

I think the English are an unbelievably musical nation and always have been.

I love Mozart, but I often make a terrible hash of it.

Passionate musicians only come from passionate five-year-olds.

Sometimes, musicians worry too much about how beautifully they are playing.

The necessity for rules and strictness is a way of dealing with an enormously powerful impulse: Germans are among the most emotional people on the planet. Maybe it has to do with the fact that, as a nation, they are always drawn back to nature and the forest.