One of the great challenges is to know when things are not right.

One of the most important elements in teaching, conducting, and performing, all three, is listening.

Sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.

Never miss an opportunity to teach; when you teach others, you teach yourself.

One must always practice slowly. If you learn something slowly, you forget it slowly.

Another thing that I don't like to do is show too much how it goes. I do it once in a blue moon. Sometimes there are lessons when I don't pick up a violin at all.

The most important thing to do is really listen.

Ask many of us who are disabled what we would like in life and you would be surprised how few would say, 'Not to be disabled.' We accept our limitations.

I always consider myself lucky that I can actually cry listening to some music.

Every musical phrase has a purpose. It's like talking. If you talk with a particular purpose, people listen to you, but if you just recite, it's not as meaningful.

When you play a concerto with a small orchestra, you don't feel it is as important as Carnegie Hall. You try to work out all the little problems. Once that's all done, trust comes in.

God says when. I execute.

Everyone needs some time to themselves.

I think the negative traits are what makes us love other human beings, the foibles and the flaws.

That accurst autobiographic form which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap, and the easy.

A person you excuse from any genuine challenge is a person you do not truly respect.

Love is the direct opposite of hate. By definition it's something you can't feel for more than a few minutes at a time, so what's all this bullshit about loving somebody for the rest of your life?

I was extremely shy and had a terrible fear of public speaking. But I had fallen in love with stand-up.

Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.

We live in a beauty-obsessed culture, which on one hand is absolutely fabulous, but on the flip side, is also dangerously extreme.

Action is the foundation of all success.