Don't tell me how talented you are. Tell me how hard you work.

Of course there is no formula for success, except perhaps an unconditional acceptance of life, and what it brings

Most people ask for happiness on condition. Happiness can only be felt if you don't set any condition.

Love life and life will love you back. Love people and they will love you back.

To be alive, to able to see, to walk...it's all a miracle. I have adapted the technique of living life from miracle to miracle.

What good are vitamins? Eat a lobster, eat a pound of caviar - live! If you are in love with a beautiful blonde with an empty face and no brains at all, don't be afraid. Marry her! Live!

You cannot play the piano well unless you are singing within you.

Music is not a hobby, not even a passion with me; music is me. I feel what people get out of me is this outlook on life, which comes out in my music. My music is the last expression of all that.

I'm a free person; I feel terribly free. They could put me in chains and I still would be free because my thoughts would be mine - and that's all I want to have.

We only begin to live life when we learn to accept it on its own terms.

Sometimes I think, not so much am I a pianist, but a vampire. All my life I have lived off the blood of Chopin.

I studied a crescent moon hung crooked in a plum purple sky and thought about what it would be like to truly be seen.

But, strictly speaking, this mythology was no essential part of ancient religion, for it had no sacred sanction and no binding force on the worshippers.

There is nothing in our experience, however trivial, worldly, or even evil, which cannot be thought about christianly.

The happiest stutterers, I learned, are those who are willing to stutter in front of others.

You know the sultans used to light their garden parties with turtles? They'd put candles on their backs and let them wander around. Hundreds of them.

The value of actions lies in their timing.

I am the conscience of the 21st Century.

Bullying exists because of a lack adult intervention.

My brothers and sister have all achieved so much in their lives and achieved so much success. But I'm growing and learning, I have a strong head on my shoulders.

My temper manifests itself when I can't find something. I could swear that there is a plot against me to put kitchen utensils in the wrong drawers.