Yo-Yo Ma Quotes

I'm dead serious about my craft and just really serious about making music in itself. I take pride in making songs and albums where no two songs sound alike. That's the challenge and that's what it's all about, to keep it original and fresh and funky.

What I look for in musicians is a sense of infinity.

When one puts up a building one makes an elaborate scaffold to get everything into its proper place. But when one takes the scaffold down, the building must stand by itself with no trace of the means by which it was erected. That is how a musician should work.

I'm finishing building a house and setting up a shop to build custom electronical musical instruments.

Actors spend most of their time out of work, so I actually spend more time making furniture. The thing about furniture that's much better than acting is that it's just me. There's no director, no script - the concept is me, unless a client wants something.

I have played Yamaha instruments since I was young, specifically their alto saxophones, and I have always appreciated their top-notch quality when it comes to making instruments.

Composers are very individual creatures.

There are a whole bunch of instruments I'd like to build.

I was fortunate enough to work at the peak of the great golden age of musicals. And then for awhile, I think they were being advanced in different ways. Andrew Lloyd-Webber brought the rock beat to musicals; people tried different things. The joy of musicals is that there is no perfect recipe; it is what you throw into it.

This world is not a platform where you will hear Thalberg-piano-playing. It is a piano manufactory, where are dust and shavings and boards, and saws and files and rasps and sandpapers. The perfect instrument and the music will be hereafter.

Consider how wool is turned into an elegantly designed carpet by coming into contact with an intelligent person.

I became interested in building furniture, because I couldn't find pieces I really loved for myself and my clients. I picked stuff up from the street, and tweaked those pieces to make them what I really wanted. It became a career!

You think it's all written, but it's not. There's always another way to twist those three chords around.

The best computer scientists are...technologists who crave beauty.

The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill. He loves to do what he does well and, having done it well, he loves to do it better. You see it in his science. You see it in the magnificence with which he carves and builds, the loving care, the gaiety, the effrontery. The monuments are supposed to commemorate kings and religions, heroes, dogmas, but in the end the man they commemorate is the builder.

Mozart combined high formality and playfulness that delights as no other composition in any other medium does.

Modern music and artistry would look and sound completely different if not for the groundbreaking contributions Michael Jackson gifted to the world.

We have entered, almost without noticing, an age of exploration and discovery unparalleled since the Renaissance.

If man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

There is the same difference between talent and genius that there is between a stone mason and a sculptor

Artists are always young.

My hope is to continue to make new music and go with the flow. I think I'll always be creative. I want to keep making good music, put myself into positions where I need to rise to the occasion of playing in front of an audience, and continually get better at what I'm doing.

I've said before that every craftsman searches for what's not there to practice his craft.

If you're in music, you're in music, and if you're in music you just want to keep making records and playing. That's what it's about, isn't it? At least, that's what I always thought it was about, anyway. I don't think I could bear years and years off. Perhaps in me older, older age, maybe I will, for physical reasons. But to me you've always got to keep proving yourself. I never want to just sit on me laurels. You have to keep forging, to prove yourself to yourself. I always think, every time I start a record, this could be the best thing I've ever done.

I'm working on guitars for free, because I love working on guitars anyway.