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

I don't feel that the conductor has real power. The orchestra has the power, and every member of it knows instantaneously if you're just beating time.

When you play a concerto with a small orchestra, you don't feel it is as important as Carnegie Hall. You try to work out all the little problems. Once that's all done, trust comes in.

In Paris they have special wheelchairs that go through every doorway. They don't change the doorways, they change the wheelchairs. To hell with the people! If someone weighs a couple more pounds, that's it!

I don't know if it's ever happened to you, but it's one of my funniest and saddest experiences, when you go into a hotel, and they have an accessible walk-in shower. So you go in and open the curtain, and there is a bench off to the side of the shower. However, the shower is rectangular. On one side there's a bench, but the faucets are across from you. So if you sit on the bench, you cannot reach the faucets.

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.

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