The best way to refine an interpretation is by getting out and performing.

Being a classical musician, you're doing many things anyway. One day you're doing Bach concerto and the next you're doing some avant-garde thing. It's just another hat that I'm allowed to wear.

There are some days I take my violin out and it feels dreadful, like nothing is responding, and I want to sell it and get rid of it. And the next day suddenly the skies open up and the sound is glorious again. So it's like a relationship: There are good days and bad days.

When you play for ticket-holders, you are already validated. I have no sense that I need to be accepted. I'm already accepted.

I don't want to portray myself as a daredevil. I'm not at all.

We live in the least ugly time in history. If you look at back when Beethoven was writing, half the kids were dying, mothers were dying at childbirth, there were more wars going on then than there are now. People wrote the most beautiful things during the ugliest times.

I never had any real expectations about what sort of success I would have or all the publicity.