Music is powered by ideas. If you don't have clarity of ideas, you're just communicating sheer sound.

More Quotes by Yo-Yo Ma

Good things happen when you meet strangers.

Passion is one great force that unleashes creativity, because if you're passionate about something, then you're more willing to take risks.

I think one of the great things about being a musician is that you never stop learning.

One of the things I love about music is live performance.

As you begin to realize that every different type of music, everybody's individual music, has its own rhythm, life, language and heritage, you realize how life changes, and you learn how to be more open and adaptive to what is around us.

A composition is always more than the sum of its parts. In other words, a really good piece of music is more than itself. It's sort of like a prism, which you can see from each facet a single totality.