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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Someone who does not practice what he preaches expresses only hypocrisy.

Life is a game, you can't afford to lose.

Wherever he went he left footprints so firm that nobody could later efface or blur them, not even he himself, when on rare occasions he was tempted to do so.

Beauty is an ecstasy it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all.

I'll have a lot of wrinkles on my face, but I feel like my heart will be fat and full.

The months before my son was born, I used to yell from night to morn, 'Whatever it is, I'm against it! No matter what it is or who commenced it, I'm against it!'

Just like a turtle, we only make progress if we stick our neck out.

I'm interested in music that happens now and that relates to our lives now.

To breathe, we do not only need air and lungs, but also freedom!

Ideas come and go, stories stay.