“The blues are like the fugue in 18th century. It's probably the music ...” — Michael Tippett Quote

The blues are like the fugue in 18th century. It's probably the music that belongs most to our time.

Beethoven suppressed everything, his personal life disappeared until he was locked inside. That is a figure quite extreme.

My true function within a society which embraces all of us is to continue an age-old tradition. This tradition is to create images from the depths of the imagination and to give them form, whether visual, intellectual or musical.

Shakespeare fascinated me. He hardly ever left the country. His imagination was worldwide though reading.

I'm outside the music I've made. I have no interest in it.

There's a lot of freedom to do anything you want in Mexico. It's just that that freedom belongs to a few. It's a huge country with a big contrast. There is this big inequality, so those like us that have the chance to do things, we know we are very lucky.

Every work of art belongs to his time. I would not paint again the Mona Lisa in the third dimension.

Wherever the career wasn't going the way I wanted it to, I would experience those disappointments, and I would put them somewhere where I could say, 'Come on now, you're still working. Keep your focus where it belongs.'

The sage belongs to the same obsolete repertory as the virtuous maiden and the enlightened monarch.