First thing about being a patient-you have to learn patience.

It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.

Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.

Music originally had a social function. You were in church, in a concert hall, a marching band; you were dancing. I'm concerned that music could be too separated from its roots and just become a pleasure-giving experience, like a drug.

Music is...a fundamental way of expressing our humanity - and it is often our best medicine.

I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can

There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate - the genetic and neural fate - of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.