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People will ask, 'Are you famous?' And I always answer, 'My mother thinks so.'

Yo-Yo Ma

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Yo-Yo Ma
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: October 7
Actor
Cellist
Composer
Music Pedagogue
Musician
Paris
France
Yo Yo Ma
YoYo Ma
Always
Thinking
People
Famous
Thinks
Answer
Answers
Asks
Mother

More quotes by Yo-Yo Ma

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You go through phases. You have to reinvent reasons for playing, and one year's answer might not do for another.
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This middle age thing is a little weird. Some friends and mentors are gone, and there's a very forward-looking new generation coming up behind me. So it's very much finding my own place.
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Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.
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I really would like to be involved in things and to understand things, and in some ways you've got to be careful what you wish for because I feel very, very blessed to have such an interesting life and to be able to have little snapshots of lives of people from many different parts of the world.
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Our cultural strength has always been derived from our diversity of understanding and experience.
Yo-Yo Ma
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Music is one of the ways we can achieve a kind of shorthand to understand each other.
Yo-Yo Ma
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I love grocery shopping when I'm home. That's what makes me feel totally normal. I love both the idea of home as in being with my family and friends, and also the idea of exploration. I think those two are probably my great interests.
Yo-Yo Ma
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I play an instrument that has four strings, and I'm still trying to get it right. What I've tried to do in the process of playing these four strings is to try and understand the people I meet, the stories they have to tell. And then become an advocate for them and their stories through music.
Yo-Yo Ma
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As a child, you respond physically, tactically. You're delighted by sound, you're delighted by recognizing something. It's like hide and seek. Is it there? Is it not there? Is it this note? Is it not this note? It's one fantastic game.
Yo-Yo Ma
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I think that peace is, in many ways, a precondition of joy.
Yo-Yo Ma
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Classical music is one of the best things that ever happened to mankind. If you get introduced to it in the right way, it becomes your friend for life.
Yo-Yo Ma
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I think of a piece of music as something that comes alive when it is being performed, and I feel that my role in the transmission of music is to be its best advocate at that moment.
Yo-Yo Ma
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Nobody else can make the sound you make.
Yo-Yo Ma
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Perfection is not very communicative
Yo-Yo Ma
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Once something is memorable, it's living and you're using it. That to me is the foundation of a creative society.
Yo-Yo Ma
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Culture opens our hearts to one another. And the currency in culture is not money, but trust.
Yo-Yo Ma
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My involvement in the political arena is to make sure there's a place for culture.
Yo-Yo Ma
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The role of the musician is to go from concept to full execution. Put another way, it's to go from understanding the content of something to really learning how to communicate it and make sure it's well-received and lives in somebody else.
Yo-Yo Ma
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Music has always been transnational.
Yo-Yo Ma
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A Senegalese poet said 'In the end we will conserve only what we love. We love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.' We must learn about other cultures in order to understand, in order to love, and in order to preserve our common world heritage.
Yo-Yo Ma