Maybe it's egocentric or whatever, but when I'm playing Beethoven, Bach, Hendrix, or whoever it is, in the end, it just feels like my own music and I'm making it up as I'm going along.

I'm always improving and I want to get better and never hit a plateau. I find it an amazing adventure.

You can't learn pathos or profundity.

I hate complacency. I play every gig as if it could be my last, then I enjoy it more than ever.

Even if you're playing Brahms or a Beethoven concerto, you've got to have a different vantage point, slightly, each time.

I've learnt new scales through playing different types of music, like Indian raga scales, gipsy scales and harmonically-based jazz scales.

If you do the same thing every night, that's the death of music.

The Beatles are a classical group because they're classic.

Bach was a top harmonist geezer, which is why the jazz cats love him.

I see it as my job to try to keep Bach in the mainstream and present his music with, rather than without, its emotional core.

Menuhin was playing Bach on a fantastic spiritual level when he was a teenager.

I really believe, or want to believe, really I am nuts, otherwise I'll never be sane.

I write because I want more than one life; I insist on a wider selection. It's greed, plain and simple.

Love alone makes us happy, because we live in relation, and we live to love and to be loved.

The real choice we have to make is between peace and nationalism.

You have to remember that in addition to running a literary agency, I am also an ebook publisher.

I like to get far away from myself when I'm acting.

A princely mind will undo a private family.

Strain your brain more than your eye.

I doubt the fact, to begin with, but if it be so even, what is this but in grand words asking me to believe a thing because I like it.

Oh, that way madness lies; let me shun that.