Itzhak Perlman Quotes

One must always practice slowly. If you learn something slowly, you forget it slowly.

Never miss an opportunity to teach; when you teach others, you teach yourself.

Sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.

Every musical phrase has a purpose. It's like talking. If you talk with a particular purpose, people listen to you, but if you just recite, it's not as meaningful.

The most important thing to do is really listen.

Perhaps our task in this shaky, fast-changing, bewildering world in which we live is to make music, at first with all that we have, and then, when that is no longer possible, to make music with what we have left.

Everybody has a different kind of talent and a different timetable as to when they develop.

One of the most important elements in teaching, conducting, and performing, all three, is listening.

In difficult times, people just like to hear music. They like to be moved by what they hear. And music speaks different languages.

Ask many of us who are disabled what we would like in life and you would be surprised how few would say, 'Not to be disabled.' We accept our limitations.

One of the great challenges is to know when things are not right.

You decide to be a musician, you have to put in the time.

I always consider myself lucky that I can actually cry listening to some music.

I always say separate your abilities from your disabilities. You know, if I could play the violin, I don't have to play it standing up. I can play it sitting down and so on.

Nothing is better for my playing than teaching because when you teach, you have to think and you have to listen what other people do. And then all of a sudden, you play yourself and then you say, my goodness, I don't need a teacher. I'm my own teacher. Then I can react to what I'm doing immediately. It really improves.

Another thing that you really do when you play, that you're supposed to do, is colors. You know, you cannot play with one color. If you play with one color, again, it's like watching a beautiful painting, a drawing, but it's all in blue or it's all in red. May be very nice, but not very interesting.

This young wine may have a lot of tannins now, but in five or 10 years it is going to be spectacular, despite the fact that right now it tastes like crude oil. You know this is how it is supposed to taste at this stage of development.

I can actually see the sound in my head. I can actually see it... But each sound is different so this one has that sparkle, there is a sparkle to the sound.

Don't play the way it goes. Play the way it is. And the way it is every time you play it, it's slightly different. Look for something. So that's the challenge not to be bored.

For every child prodigy that you know about, at least 50 potential ones have burned out before you even heard about them.

I can't walk very well, but I'm not onstage to do walking. I'm on the stage to play.

There are people who are uncanny, who are finished products at a young age. I wasn't, thank God.

Beethoven concertos ... Tchaicovsky concertos ... with a lot of these wonderful masterpieces there's always something wonderful to find ... there's always something new to find.

Every person with a disability has a slightly different kind of disability. Not everybody has the same problems. Usually the wheelchairs are the wheelchairs. It's the same height and so on. It's a problem.

Any gifted child can potentially get in real trouble because of the way they are handled.