There's a part of me that's always charging ahead. I'm the curious kid, always going to the edge.

Music has always been transnational; people pick up whatever interests them, and certainly a lot of classical music has absorbed influences from all over the world.

You go through phases. You have to reinvent reasons for playing, and one year's answer might not do for another.

What came up at age 49 is I realized that of all the things I'm interested in, the thing I'm most interested in is figuring out what makes people tick, why people think the way they do, why they act the way they do. And I realized that music is such a great way to investigate why people do what they do.

Our cultural strength has always been derived from our diversity of understanding and experience.

Good things happen when you meet strangers.

When people ask me how they should approach performance, I always tell them the professional musician should aspire to the state of the beginner.