I must tell you I take terrible risks. Because my playing is very clear, when I make a mistake you hear it. If you want me to play only the notes without any specific dynamics, I will never make one mistake. Never be afraid to dare.

My future is in my past and my past is my present. I must now make the present my future.

If you want me to play only the notes without any specific dynamics, I will never make one mistake.

I am a general. My soldiers are the keys and I have to command them.

Perfection itself is imperfection.

I must tell you I take terrible risks. Because my playing is very clear, when I make a mistake you hear it. If you want me to play only the notes without any specific dynamics, I will never make one mistake. Never be afraid to dare.

My face is my passport.

Always there should be a little mistake here and there - I am for it. The people who don't do mistakes are cold like ice. It takes risk to make a mistake. If you don't take risk, you are boring.

As far as practicing is concerned, I usually try to do one to two hours a day. It isn't good to practice too much, or your playing becomes too mechanical.

Behind the notes, something different is told, and that's what the interpreter must find out. He may sit down and play one passage one way and then perhaps exaggerate the next, but, in any event, he must do something with the music. The worst thing is not to do anything.

For me, the intellect is always the guide but not the goal of the performance. Three things have to be coordinated, and not one must stick out. Not too much intellect because it can become scholastic. Not too much heart because it can become schmaltz. Not too much technique because you become a mechanic.

I loved singing. But can you imagine my voice in an opera house?

I may play the same program from one recital to the next, but I will play it differently, and because it is always different, it is always new.

I studied with Felix Blumenfeld, who had studied piano with Anton Rubinstein and composition with Tchaikovsky. Felix, my professor, was the right hand of Anton Rubinstein. Blumenfeld knew his playing by heart, from every angle.

I tried playing for the public, and I selected music that I thought would be pleasing to them. Times are different now. Today, I play the music I want, and I just try to do my best.

I was a terrible student. For me, to take a book home was a trial.

Imitation is a caricature. Any imitation. Find out for yourself.

It is important for the musician to learn as much about the composer as possible and to study the music he has written. Then, even a short piece by Brahms or Chopin can be played with much more understanding.

Life is very busy now. I find that in today's cities, the public is very tired after working the whole day. When concerts start at eight o'clock, the wife pushes the husband to go to the concert, where some promptly fall asleep!

Scriabin slept with Chopin under his pillow, and I slept with Wagner under mine. I could not concentrate on memorizing Bach fugues, but I had all of 'Gotterdammerung' in my fingers.

Scriabin, as you know, is a mystic composer. His music is supersensuous, superromantic, and supermysterious. Everything is super; it is all a little overboard. Anyway, my parents were pleased that I played for him.

The most important thing is to make a percussive instrument a singing instrument. Teachers should stress this aspect in their instruction, but it seems that very few of them actually do.

The score is not a bible, and I am never afraid to dare. The music is behind those dots.

To be able to produce many varieties of sound, now that is what I call technique, and that is what I try to do. I don't adhere to any methods, because I simply don't believe in them. I think each pianist must ultimately carve his own way, technically and stylistically.

Without false modesty, I feel that, when I'm on the stage, I'm the king, the boss of the situation.

You have to open the music, so to speak, and see what's behind the notes because the notes are the same whether it is the music of Bach or someone else.

The piano is an orchestra with 88 things, you know.

Marriage is a very good thing, but I think it's a mistake to make a habit out of it.

It's pretty simple, pretty obvious: that people's first impressions of people are really a big mistake.

They all went into the bar business. Which was a mistake, because they began to sip at the merchandise and it set them back, set us all back. Well, them more than I.

The choice is between which mistake is easier to correct: underdoing it or overdoing it.

I've got to keep breathing. It'll be my worst business mistake if I don't.

They think something's gone wrong, but in Don't Look Now, for instance, one scene was made by a mistake. It's the scene where Donald Sutherland goes to look for the policeman who's investigating the two women.

It's a mistake to assume that Islamists always come from the slums. Indeed, many come from affluent families but for some reason just couldn't manage to integrate into Western society, even though they had good opportunities for advancement.

I find that the best way to do things is to constantly move forward and to never doubt anything and keep moving forward, if you make a mistake say you made a mistake.

The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.

It's a great mistake, I think, to put children off with falsehoods and nonsense, when their growing powers of observation and discrimination excite in them a desire to know about things.

The secularists in Turkey haven't underestimated religion, they just made the mistake of believing they could control it with the power of the army alone.

In traditional schools, you're penalized for making a mistake. But that won't work in the new information culture, in the digital world we live in today.

You are just as capable of making a mistake as anyone else. By insisting too eagerly upon a small right, you may turn it into a wrong against yourself and also against your neighbor.

Last Friday night, I Twitted a photograph of myself that I intended to send as a direct message as part of a joke to a woman in Seattle. Once I realized I posted to Twitter I panicked, I took it down and said that I had been hacked. I then continued with that story, to stick to that story which was a hugely regrettable mistake.

It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.

To help yourself, you must be yourself. Be the best that you can be. When you make a mistake, learn from it, pick yourself up and move on.

Make no mistake about it. These are not 'kookie' birds. Right now the greatest player, the big tent on the political scene in America, is called the Tea Party movement.

I surrendered my youth to the people I feared when I could have been out there loving someone. Don't make that mistake yourself. Life's too damn short.

The results would have stayed on the watch face until the batteries died. But trying to make time stand still this way would have been a mistake. It is just as important to erase times eventually as to save them at first.

I don't like to be labeled, to be anything. I've made the mistake before myself of labeling my music, but it's counter-productive.

A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.

Take all that is given whether wealth, love or language, nothing comes by mistake and with good digestion all can be turned to health.