Beethoven and Beatles, Mozart and Michael Jackson, Paganini and Prince - I like them all.

Beethoven and Beatles, Mozart and Michael Jackson, Paganini and Prince - I like them all.

Violin playing is a physical art with great traditions behind it.

All the time I'm changing as an artist and as a person.

But I don't mind, I'm a bit of a touring animal. When I'm on tour that is the greatest thrill for me, playing to a live audience.

But I don't think I've grown up to be a damaged adult.

But I still think it's mind over matter in the sense that if you're strong, you can combat anything.

But then I hit my 20s and only made two albums, and now I live in a ski resort as a ski bum basically.

For example, I loved English and history at school. I would have loved to have done a degree in either. But my Mom said I didn't have time for university.

I could have taken the easy life and just done classical, but I felt very strongly about the album, my first pop album, the first time that I'd fused so many influences. I was very proud when it was in the charts in 25 countries at once.

I don't mind about the boos from the audience.

I started skiing around the same time as I began playing the piano, at around four, before moving to the violin at five.

I will be the Thai equivalent of Eddie the Eagle.

I've decided to make my main priority for the next two years not playing the violin, but training for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

In an ideal world, I'd spend every weekend at my home in Zermatt in Switzerland.

In winter I go skiing on Saturdays and Sundays when the slopes are quieter due to changeover day for tourists, and in summer I hike up into the mountains at sunset, just as the village is settling down to dinner.

Kids can be born with potential but unless it's encouraged - pushed, even - I don't think it will ever come to fruition.

Music is about the performance.

Music will always be my greatest passion.

People find it hard to understand how I can risk ruining my career as a musician by injuring myself on the slopes, but I've always been a tomboy.

The stage is the best experience in the world. It's a great compliment to be able to share the music, because people can hear my album but they don't get to make the connection in the same way as when it's one-to-one.

To even get to the Olympics, I have to qualify for the 2013 World Championships and the standard is high. I know I am always going to be a few points behind the top guys.

When I hit my 20s, I took a chill pill and relaxed because throughout my teens I was churning out an album a year. It was a treadmill of work then recording, promoting and touring.

They were giving us these incredible bear hugs and my ribs are still aching from all of those bear hugs.

The songwriters whom we think of being the greatest songwriters usually write one hit and six or seven flops. That includes the Irving Berlins and the Hoagy Carmichaels, the Harold Arlens, Cole Porter.

I think very poorly of United Russia. United Russia is the party of corruption, the party of crooks and thieves.

It says on the back of the Nyquil box, 'May cause drowsiness.' It should say, 'Don't make any plans, OK? Kiss your family and friends good-bye.'

No painting can tell the truth of a single instant; nosnapshot can do anything else.

I don't know what caused my tinnitus, but I started to become aware of a very low ringing noise in my right ear, which is now constantly there.

Use it or lose it.

In religions which have lost their creative spark the gods eventually become no more than poetic motifs or ornaments for decorating human solitude and walls.

A holiday cocktail party is where some stranger will learn more about you in an hour than your spouse has learned in a lifetime.

If it sells, it sells. If it doesn't sell, I'll go make a movie.

The words that enlighten the soul are more precious than jewels.

It kind of irritates me that I'm seen as this pretty face. People also say I'm too thin. The truth is pretty people aren't as accepted as other people. It comes with all these stigmas.

My wife Martha used to call me Ol' Lemon Face because of my facial contortions when I play Lucille. I squeeze my eyes and open my mouth, raise my eyebrows, cock my head and God knows what else. I look like I'm in torture, when in truth, I'm in ecstasy. I don't do it for show. Every fiber of my being is tingling.

The secret of confidence is focusing on what you can control, not on what you can't.

I hate that bookstores are closing. Hate it! What's better than hanging out a bookstore, be it independent or chain, and talking books with people who love books?

He alone is great and happy who requires neither to command nor to obey in order to secure his being of some importance in the world.

Early in my career, I got roles that demanded that I be fit to carry off the angry young man look. Of course, I'm a fitness freak, and that's something I picked up from my dad.

In today's competitive economy, to stand still is to die.

The thing about loving someone is that you have to love them the way they need to be loved and not the way you want to love them.

Most of my films seem to be about people bewildered by the world around them, who don't fit into it and are trying to understand it.

Sometimes Hollywood is a small town on the West Coast of America at the furthest point from everywhere else, and that can make it a little provincial and insular.

Has anybody seen 'The Notebook' and not cried? I don't know, I don't know if that's the case. It sort of hangs around for a while.

Welcome to the Salvation Army. I've never been associated with an offense so nice about giving the ball away.

If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.