Before my teen years, I was losing my hearing pretty quickly, and I was getting very, very angry. I was beginning to become an angry person because of that.

I try to plant myself where I am and embrace what is there in front of me.

Holidays are about experiences and people, and tuning into what you feel like doing at that moment. Enjoy not having to look at a watch.

I'm not a deaf musician. I'm a musician who happens to be deaf.

Percussion is the most adaptable family of instruments. The biggest challenge is to project percussion in a lyrical way.

Music really is our daily medicine.

When I was 12, I happened to see a schoolmate playing percussion, and it looked interesting. I asked for lessons, and it felt right.

I walk into a kids' store, and it's amazing, the types of instruments - little squeaky things, rattling things, spinning tops.

A large part of my work has been collaborating with composers; I think we've commissioned about 140 pieces now, a lot of them percussion concertos.

Hearing is a form of touch. You feel it through your body, and sometimes it almost hits your face.

I hope the seeds I have sown will be taken up by those who will follow me because the journey I have begun cannot be undertaken in isolation.

My dad always says that kindness is our religion and if we treat everybody the way we would like to be treated, the world would be a better place.

Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it.

There is such dissociation between what the eyes see and what the mind envisions. The final thought is just a matter of interpretation, coloured by our experiences.

By changing how you perceive things and how you act upon those perceptions, you will change your life.

If you want to know what's going on, keep your mind in the fridge or it might go off.

The breath of the mind is attention 128

A sense of responsibility is the clearest indication of mature leadership.

More and more, the choice for the world's people is between becoming world warriors or world citizens.

Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.

Together, we can make ourselves a nation that spends more on books than on bombs, more on hospitals than the terrible tools of war, more on decent houses than military aircraft.