My face is my passport.

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.

If people take the film and screen it whenever possible for their social and professional networks, we can continue to make a difference. It is one more element we have to use in the ongoing effort to take back our country.

Maybe I'm naive, but I subscribe to the idea that nobody is actually making strategic decisions about their career. Trying to do that would be like playing three-card monte on Canal Street.

If you can't play guitar and sing in Nashville, you might as well just be a construction worker.

The Magna Carta is widely known to be one of the foundational documents for our Constitution. I can only imagine that a mention of that in a court decision would be forbidden by our friends on the right.

There's one more thing I want to say. It's a touchy subject. Black beauty. Black sensuality. We live in a culture where the beauty of black people isn't always as celebrated as other types. I'd like to help change that if I can!

I'm a huge fan of 'Kung Fu Panda.' I honestly think that Jack Black's voice work in 'Kung Fu Panda' is the best voice work that's ever been done. He's so funny, and it's such an endearing character. It really is great.

I was 27, an unemployed actress living in a really crappy studio apartment. I had just moved to Los Angeles alone, away from my family. I had cervical and uterine cancer and I was told that I would never be able to carry a baby.

I'm a bit of a wine snob and like a glass of Chateaux Margaux '82 with a meal or to unwind.

If worms carried pistols, birds wouldn't eat 'em.

After student years of flat-sharing and living with other people's taste, I went into decorating overdrive when I acquired my first apartment - its floor plan not much bigger than the vintage Hermes scarves I then wore side-knotted on my head, pirate-style.

Only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth and that is not speaking.

There has to be policies about that, about what materials we use and so on.

Movies and I just equally avoided each other at certain times in my life, you know?

I have never fully exorcised shames that struck me to the heart as a child except through written violence, shadowy caricature, and dark jokes.

I don't care what people do. I don't care how people remember my albums. I do them for my own reasons.

I think everything I write is from an atheist perspective. I mean, it's partly from an atheist perspective because I'm an atheist, and I'm just not really interested in religious-based questions.

I've been trying to get cast as a lesbian for years.

A breeze passes in the night. When did it spring up Whence does it come Whither is it going No man knows.

An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy; because there is a limit beyond which no institution and no property can bear taxation.

Strong female leads make more of an impact in the U.K. than in Denmark.

We don't sign an artist to fill a void, ever. I'll never find a Taylor Swift. You can't find a new Madonna, you cannot find a Prince, a Bob Marley, a John Lennon. You won't find another Kanye West. We simply deal with people as they walk in, and we say we either love them or we don't.

Scott McAdams is a nice guy, but I don't know that most Alaskans believe that he's electable.