When playing music, it is possible to achieve a unique sense of peace.

It is always interesting and sometimes even important to have intimate knowledge of a composer's life, but it is not essential in order to understand the composer's works.

You can't expect someone born into a family with no music... to understand when I'm conducting the Schoenberg Variations.

The Barenboim Foundation has nothing to do with politics.

I can't stand going out to one more dinner with some Mrs. So-and-So who might leave a million dollars to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when she dies.

I love conducting. What I'm tired of is music administration. I don't want that. I just want to make music.

When you love somebody and they die young and you are young, too, it is very hard.

I have music in my brain all the time, all sorts.

What the world is saying to us human beings is, 'Don't stick to the old ways, learn to think anew.' And that's what musicians do every day.

There are wonderful restaurants in London. I love Indian food and I like Arab food, and I go very often to the Arab restaurant Noura.

I liked very much when we lived in Hampstead. We would go for walks on the Heath. I liked it better than living in the centre of town.

In my mother's belly, I remember not liking the tempi my father played the Beethoven Sonatas in.

Beethoven's music tends to move from chaos to order, as if order were an imperative of human existence.

Jewish intellectuals contributed a great deal to insure that Europe became a continent of humanism, and it is with these humanist ideals that Europe must now intervene in the Middle East conflict.

US presidents can make all the commitments and declarations they want until they are blue in the face, in the Muslim world they will always be perceived as partisan.

Tradition demands that we not speak poorly of the dead.

The tempo is the suitcase. If the suitcase is too small, everything is completely wrinkled. If the tempo is too fast, everything becomes so scrambled you can't understand it.

Sound is often talked about in a very subjective way, as if it had a colour. This is a bright sound, this is a dark sound. I don't believe in that because I think that is much too subjective.

There are many types of silence. There is a silence before the note, there is a silence at the end and there is a silence in the middle.

Anti-Semitism has no historical, political and certainly no philosophical origins. Anti-Semitism is a disease.

Once you start playing a piece, there is a connection between every note. You cannot say, 'I will not concentrate on this note.' You cannot ignore things the way you do in the rest of your life.

We need to take music out of the ivory tower - both for musicians and for the public. Otherwise, classical music will not survive the 21st century.

Live life to the full, and become more curious every day. The more you find out about life, the richer your music-making will be.

To have real knowledge, one must understand the essence of things and not only their manifestations.