A friend gave me a CD of the 'Pathetique' Symphony as a Christmas present. I went home and I put on the CD expecting to listen to Tchaikovsky. But it started 'ta ta ta taaa.' It was too long for me. I didn't understand it at first but then I fell in love in love in love.

I grew up a Red Sox fan. I grew up going to Fenway Park and the Museum of Fine Arts and the Science Museum and Symphony Hall and going to the Common walking around. My whole family at different times lived and worked in Boston.

I would never have become music director of the Chicago Symphony which would have been an extremely sad loss.

Coming to understand a painting or a symphony in an unfamiliar style to recognize the work of an artist or school to see or hear in new ways is as cognitive an achievement as learning to read or write or add.

Leadership is getting players to believe in you. If you tell a teammate you're ready to play as tough as you're able to you'd better go out there and do it. Players will see right through a phony. And they can tell when you're not giving it all you've got.

It doesn't matter that the way of life shown by Hollywood was phony. It helped you hope.

I love readings and my readers but the din of voices of the audience gives me stage fright and the din of voices inside whisper that I am a fraud and that the jig is up. Surely someone will rise up from the audience and say out loud that not only am I not funny and helpful but I'm annoying and a phony.

Personally I think four is the perfect number of children for our particular family. Four is enough to create the frenzied cacophony that my husband and I find so joyful.

It's like you always have to put on a happy face be the phony baloney and I'm so not that. I never was that I'll never be that. That is part of the business that I don't like. Maybe that will always keep me an outsider I don't know. But that's fine.

When the bright angel dominates out comes a great work of art a Michelangelo David or a Beethoven symphony.

It was really amazing. I mean he'd never mentioned that he played in the symphony like serious violin playing not fiddle playing. And he just blew us away.

You can't play a symphony alone it takes an orchestra to play it.

Our world is so glutted with useless information images useless images sounds all this sort of thing. It's a cacophony it's like a madness I think that's been happening in the past twenty-five years. And I think anything that can help a person sit in a room alone and not worry about it is good.