Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity. But without proper preparation, I cannot see it, retain it, and use it.

This is not a pleasant route for many young people to consider. You have to be either hopelessly passionate, or very stupid.

Well, Mozart is extraordinary not only in that he became virtuoso along the lines of his father, but that he had that compositional gift, that melodic gift. By the time he was four, he was doing piano concertos with harmony in the background.

Dancers are allowed, indeed encouraged, to remain children forever.

The irony of multitasking is that it's exhausting: when you're doing two or three things simultaneously, you use more energy than the sum of energy required to do each task independently. You're also cheating yourself because your're not doing anything excellently. You're compromising your virtuosity. In the words of T. S. Elliot, you're 'distracted from distractions by distractions'.

Our guys have a vision of something bigger.

Everyone has a talent. It's simply a question of good discipline, of the good fortune to have an education that meshes with that talent, and a lot of luck.