One piece of advice I often give young singers, including my son Vijay, is to not get sidetracked from their primary duty of learning music. This is the age of marketing and hard sell. Everybody wants instant results. But no amount of hard sell will prop you up if you don’t hone your craft.

Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped.

The impatient idealist says: ‘Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.’ But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace.

Experience has further taught me this, that we ruin ourselves by impatience.

Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there. The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary.

A good artist ought never to allow impatience to overcome his sense of the main end of art – perfection.

Paper is more patient than man.

He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year.