As for my relationship to Beethoven, I admire people who can say what they really think. It's as though he's saying, 'That's how I feel about the world, and I don't care what people may say.' His music is pure and honest. Beethoven never pretends to be anybody else.

Andris Nelsons

I grew up on Bach and Beethoven, and now I'm listening to more modern composers who I can't even name. But since I'm constantly doing music, it's difficult to have that quality time to listen to music and do classical stuff.

A. R. Rahman

Time Music Who

While I'm working, I stick with music that won't distract me - the dub stylings of Scientist and King Tubby, maybe some Beethoven string quartets.

Adam Mansbach

Work Music Art

As a kid, I loved classical music. Composers like Beethoven were like rock stars to me. Then there were the real rock stars: The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and Bob Dylan.

Alan Menken

Music Love Were

Guided By Voices was huge when I was 16. Then I got into the Beatles, then classical music, Beethoven.

Albert Hammond, Jr.

Music Voices Voice

There are different people who got me into music, but what I liked about Beethoven is that even when I didn't understand it or it was too long, there's still something about it that drove me to it. Then it got me excited about actually learning music, like a theory of it.

Albert Hammond, Jr.

Music Learning Who

We are fans of Mozart and Beethoven, as well 'South Park' and Borat. We believe that we can attract many people who eschew the serious ambiance of concert halls and don't go to classical music concerts because of such reasons. However, there is a 'serious humor' on the stage: funny and ridiculous. That is important!

Aleksey Igudesman

Music Humor Funny

I want to listen to Beethoven and Mozart. I want to read the best minds. I want to live with uplifting art. I don't want to live a grubby life.

Alexandra Stoddard

Life Art Wit

What can a first impression tell us about anyone? Why, no more than a chord can tell us about Beethoven, or a brushstroke about Botticelli.

Amor Towles

Why Us Than

A Beethoven symphony should be rehearsed like chamber music, only for a lot more people.

Andre Previn

Music Us T

All composers who came after were influenced by Beethoven, even during his lifetime, both by his personality and by his music. He was a father figure for generations.

Andris Nelsons

Time Music Life

I always see Beethoven as having been influenced by Haydn. Yet he started a revolution - not just to be different, but also because he lived in a revolutionary era.

Andris Nelsons

Art Ways Way

As for my relationship to Beethoven, I admire people who can say what they really think. It's as though he's saying, 'That's how I feel about the world, and I don't care what people may say.' His music is pure and honest. Beethoven never pretends to be anybody else.

Andris Nelsons

Relationship Music Car

I think that, as a person, Beethoven talks to everyone in different ways.

Andris Nelsons

Ways Way Very

I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.

Anne Stevenson

Music Art Ya

I cannot listen to Beethoven or Mahler or Chopin or Bach when I write because those composers require you stop what you are doing and listen.

Antonio Damasio

You Write Use

I suppose I have become a sort of living monument in Portugal. But I come from a family with roots all over the world, so the idea of patriotism is not very strong in me. My country is the country of Chekhov, Beethoven, Velasquez - writers I like, painters and artists I admire.

Antonio Lobo Antunes

Patriotism Men Family

I have no idea what was the first record I ever bought, but I think I asked my mom to buy me... um... a collection of Beethoven when I was a little girl because I became very addicted to his music. It might have been piano sonatas.

Beth Hart

Music Mom Very

The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.

Billy Wilder

World Us T

I think comedy has a range, with multiple peaks in different areas. It's like trying to compare Beethoven and the Beatles. Sometimes I hear from people, 'I think you try too hard in your comedy.' And that's what I worry about.

Bo Burnham

Time Your You

Beethoven had a great look. It was very much about the drama of appearance.

Boy George

Great Very T

What makes a Beethoven symphony spectacular, what makes a Brahms rhapsody spectacular is that the patterns are wondrous.

Brian Greene

Napolean is dead - but Beethoven lives.

Bruno Walter

There is a reactionary conservative side of classical music, which is not the most exciting side of it. The side that draws me in, there's a real encouragement of risk-taking, going back to masters of that tradition like Beethoven and Bartok and Stravinsky.

Bryce Dessner

I'd love to have William Faulkner, Beethoven and Bach over. I want to find out what makes those guys tick!

Candy Crowley

There's always blood on the carpet when I play Beethoven at the piano. I hate playing the piano! And it's so hard to fight for Beethoven's soul! But that's what I have to do!

Charles Hazlewood

I hate playing the piano! And it's so hard to fight for Beethoven's soul! But that's what I have to do!

Charles Hazlewood

Mozart, Beethoven - how can you not want to share them with everyone and anyone? This stuff is of as great importance as the food we eat and the air we breathe.

Charles Hazlewood

I free-form it, rock n' roll it. I'm a creature of risk, so I don't know how I'm going to explore a Beethoven symphony until I'm doing it.

Charles Hazlewood

My grandmother got me recordings of the 'Goldberg Variations,' in addition to the 'Brandenburg Concertos,' the Mozart string quartets and Beethoven's 'Seventh Symphony.'

Chris Thile

I never listen to music when I am writing. It would be impossible. I listen to Bach in the mornings, mostly choral music; also some Handel, mostly songs and arias; I like Schubert's and Beethoven's chamber music and Sibelius' symphonies; for opera, I listen to Mozart and in recent years Wagner.

Colm Toibin

Beethoven's importance in music has been principally defined by the revolutionary nature of his compositions. He freed music from hitherto prevailing conventions of harmony and structure.

Daniel Barenboim

Beethoven was a deeply political man in the broadest sense of the word. He was not interested in daily politics, but concerned with questions of moral behaviour and the larger questions of right and wrong affecting the entire society.

Daniel Barenboim

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

Daniel Barenboim

It's funny, because in 1970 I met the Beatles quite by a chance at a party. It was the Beethoven bicentenary, and I was then also playing the Beethoven Sonatas. And that's all they wanted to hear about - I wanted to talk about them, and all they wanted to talk about was Beethoven.

Daniel Barenboim

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

Daniel Barenboim

You don't go out and play Beethoven's 'Opus 111' without having rethought about it every time you play.

Daniel Barenboim

When you hear Bach or Mozart, you hear perfection. Remember that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were great improvisers. I can hear that in their music.

Dave Brubeck

I think, bad times, I sit down and I play - there's definitely certain songs that touch in certain ways. I go back to 'Moonlight Sonata' by Beethoven; that usually takes care of everything.

David Bryan

I'm a Beethoven freak. I listen to him all the time.

David Canary

People who go to concerts hear Beethoven's symphonies hundreds of times, but 'Star Trek' is recorded, so it's not played all the time.

David Newman

In music, they're not endlessly rewriting Beethoven's 'Third Symphony;' in visual art, they aren't painting portraits of 16th-century royalty. Art moves forward.

David Shields

When my dad went to college to get his master's from Loyola, he was playing Debussy and Chopin and Beethoven. But he played all that New Orleans stuff, too. I would go with my dad to gigs, pick up the piano and the speakers, and I would be like his roadie.

Dawn Richard

It's clear on the one hand that an education enriches and informs a response to beauty, even makes it possible in esoteric cases. On the other hand, there's no question that someone with no musical education whatsoever might wander into a concert hall and be overwhelmed by the 'Beethoven Pastoral Symphony'.

Denis Dutton

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.

E. M. Forster

Imagine if Beethoven had a tape recorder. Then you'd know exactly what he meant. Maybe he meant 'Da da da da' instead of 'Boom boom boom boom!' Who knows?

Eddie Van Halen

Artists like Bach and Beethoven erected churches and temples on the heights. I only wanted... to build dwellings for men in which they might feel happy and at home.

Edvard Grieg

Bernard Herrmann used to write all his scores by himself. So did Bach, Beethoven and Stravinsky. I don't understand why this happens in the movie industry.

Ennio Morricone

I'm not a culture snob. So while, of course, I think the Mozart 'Requiem' or, say, Beethoven's 'Ninth' are some of the greatest works of art in the history of humankind, that's not to say the Beatles or Queen or Simon and Garfunkel aren't brilliant, beautiful, important works of art that should be sung without a sense of irony.

Eric Whitacre

Beethoven, Wagner, Bach, and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand. They didn't waste time waiting for inspiration.

Ernest Newman

Pulse as an active means of expression, Stravinsky and Beethoven are the two masters of that.

Esa-Pekka Salonen