People will ask, 'Are you famous?' And I always answer, 'My mother thinks so.'

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

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.

As a child, you respond physically, tactically. You're delighted by sound, you're delighted by recognizing something. It's like hide and seek. Is it there? Is it not there? Is it this note? Is it not this note? It's one fantastic game.

One of the things I love about music is live performance.

Perfection is not very communicative

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.