All my life I wanted to play music with love to every member of the audience.

I never studied, but I had the best teachers.

There is too much emphasis on technical perfection nowadays, and not enough on what music is actually about - irony, joy, human suffering, love.

You know creators, composers, need a palette for life, a color for life.

You must play for the love of music. Perfect technique is not as important as making music from the heart.

I would rather have ideas and some difficulties of technique than a perfect technique and no ideas.

In 1948 the first severe crash occurred in my life when Stalin put out his decree on formalism. There was a bulletin board in the Moscow Conservatory. They posted the decree, which said Shostakovichs compositions and Prokofievs were no longer to be played.