I always like to sing barefoot, but when I first started doing these dates with the symphonies, I of course thought I should clean up my act, being a Jewish girl from Long Island with a little bit of a trucker mouth. So I wore a gown and some high heels.

When I was growing up, there were no women in orchestras. Auditioners thought they could tell the difference between a woman playing and a man. Some intelligent person devised a simple solution: Drop a curtain between the auditioners and the people trying out. And, lo and behold, women began to get jobs in symphony orchestras.

Let's say intelligence is your ability to compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science. Chimps can't do any of that, yet we share 99 percent DNA. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one-percent difference.

When you're creating a fragrance, you're always thinking about what you want that first smell to be, that first reaction. It's a sensation, like a symphony with all of those layers and notes. I love the way it changes and the way it dries down. The fun thing about scent is that it's unique to everyone; pheromones take on a new scent.

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.

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

We've been performing with symphonies all of our career and it sounds so wonderful when they play 'My Girl' with the large string section, I want to turn around and look.

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

I hear entire symphonies, oratorios, in my head, but I can't write a note.

If I weren't the way I am, I shouldn't write my symphonies.

My symphonies would have reached Opus 100 if I had but written them down... Sometimes I am so full of music, and so overflowing with melody, that I find it simply impossible to write down anything.

The Chicago Symphony is considered the greatest orchestra in the world.

My mother was the concert master of the symphony. Absurdity and eccentricity were not criticized.

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

Writing a play, you start with less, so more is demanded of you. It's as if you have to not only write a symphony, but invent the instruments as well.

In a time when directors did not fear composers with a strong voice, Morricone wrote scores like operas or symphonies, with passion, scope, bravura and intelligence.

My earliest memories are listening to my Grandmother playing the piano at our house as I jumped up and down on the couch. She was a violinist with the Pittsburgh Symphony in the 30s and 40s, and was a huge influence on me.

I would advise my young colleagues, the composers of symphonies, to drop in sometimes at the kindergarten, too. It is there that it is decided whether there will be anybody to understand their works in twenty years' time.

To have everything written for you... It's not really creating. That's why I think symphony drummers are so limited. They 're limited to exactly what was played a hundred years before them by a thousand other drummers.

Everything will pass, and the world will perish but the Ninth Symphony will remain.