I have been coming to Los Angeles since 1975 to perform.

The stage is close to being in the middle of the hall, so that the performers are surrounded by the listeners. I feel that we are all experiencing the music together.

We should welcome applause whenever it comes.

Everyone is different. Sometimes it's very exciting; sometimes very scary.

We seem to have set up some very arcane rules as to when it is actually OK to applaud.

Applause should be an emotional response to the music, rather than a regulated social duty.

All of us love applause, and so we should - it means that the listener likes us!

Everybody makes his path differently.

I have always thought that my ear is also very influenced by my eyes.

A lot of it just has to do with luck, serendipity.

It is wonderful to see how happy all my friends in the LA Philharmonic are in their new home.

If there were no rules about when to applaud, we in the audience would have the right response almost always.

Pianists don't argue too much generally because we have such a hard time just getting things right; arguing is for string players.

The sheer force of the music calls for a wild audience reaction.

Sometimes I wish that applause would come just a bit later, when it is so beautifully hushed that I feel like holding my breath in the silence of the end.

I usually only play with very close friends.

I have been coming to Los Angeles since 1975 to perform.

I have been trying to find out exactly when listeners and performers decided that applause between movements would not be allowed, but nobody seems to have been willing to admit that they were the culprit.

How wonderful it is to play with someone you feel very close to.

Even if you don't like a concert of mine, please, please applaud at the end anyway.

If the audience walks out of a concert thinking, What a wonderful experience, then we have done our job.

Mozart often wrote to his family that certain variations or sections of pieces were so successful that they had to be encored immediately, even without waiting for the entire piece to end.

If the audience walks out of a concert thinking What a wonderful experience then we have done our job.

It's an interesting but useless bit of information that every single character in 'The Lord of the Rings' and 'The Hobbit' wears a wig, and many of them wears a prosthetic - false ears, feet, hands. In my case, nose.

The biggest thing that I get most excited about is, my family and I would watch television together, and we weren't just passive viewers. Something would happen, and then we would talk about it. When Will Smith was shot on 'Fresh Prince,' that sparked a conversation about safety.

The interesting thing about life is, there is what you think is going to happen, and what actually happens.

I began writing fictional stories and little screenplays when I was in fifth grade.

I follow my own advice: eat less, move more, eat lots of fruits, vegetables, and grains, and don't eat too much junk food. It leaves plenty of flexibility for eating an occasional junk food.

I just usually go with my own taste. If I like something, and it happens to be against the law, well, then I might have a problem.

It was always my practice to train salespeople under my direct supervision, and to treat children with the utmost consideration.

I always thought that if I made it big or got successful at what I had started out to do, that I wanted to come back to my part of the country and do something great, something that would bring a lot of jobs into this area.

I never read any fairy tales or classics until I was an adult; all we ever had was comics... No television, either. If we wanted entertainment, we hung around the fish shop.

One of the reasons I came to Berkeley was because I saw so many students of all different colors speaking so many different languages and ferociously presenting all these different views. I thought, this is the 21st century and I want to be here!

I try to make my box as big as it can be because I never want to do the same thing twice.

A painting that doesn't shock isn't worth painting.

When, in 1949, I decided to join the little band of early explorers who had followed Albert Claude in his pioneering expeditions, electron microscopy was still in its infancy.

I'm still astonished that somebody would offer me a job and pay me to do what I wanted to do.

The barriers are not erected which can say to aspiring talents and industry, "Thus far and no farther."

I have a tremendous amount of respect for military families. To have to worry about your loved ones and still try and live a normal life is extremely hard.

Having traveled to parts of the world where war has done its usual nasty work on people's lives, I have come to develop a particular hatred for the shape, the look, the sound of the AK-47.

There are people who are very dismissive of games and gamers.

I think they are very important because westerns have a code and a symbolism.

I'm interested in themes that endure from generation to generation.

When people can't feed their children, nothing else positive happens. You don't have to look farther than the United States to see that.

A shoe is not only a design, but it's a part of your body language, the way you walk. The way you're going to move is quite dictated by your shoes.

The guys that do have the confidence to hit on me are not necessarily my type, but they think they are because I'm a pop star; I sing songs, do movies. I like to feel sexy and confident on stage.

Writing, film, sculpture, music: it's all make-believe, really.