Many of the Central Asians know Russian, and Ted Levin speaks it fluently. I speak Chinese, but Mongolian is completely different, so we had to have translators.

My involvement in the political arena is to make sure there's a place for culture.

When we have a good balance between thinking and feeling... our actions and lives are always the richer for it.

I think that peace is, in many ways, a precondition of joy.

The role of the musician is to go from concept to full execution. Put another way, it's to go from understanding the content of something to really learning how to communicate it and make sure it's well-received and lives in somebody else.

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

We may be coming to a new golden age of instrument making.