I always try to teach by example and not force my ideas on a young musician. One of the reasons we're here is to be a part of this process of exchange.

I was really lucky because I went to an all-girl school, and that single-sex education really helped me because I really learned to bond with women and to not compete with or compare myself as much because we were all allowed to be ourselves and be unique and kind of have our unique strengths.

It is not like studying German, where you mull along, in a groping, uncertain way, for thirty years; and at last, just as you think you've got it, they spring the subjunctive on you, and there you are. No- and I see now plainly enough, that the great pity about the German language is, that you can't fall off it and hurt yourself. There is nothing like that feature to make you attend strictly to business.

only through new words might new worlds be called into order

Academia does not provide many opportunities for immediate gratification. You work for two years on a project, it takes two more years to get it published, and then you start hoping someone might read it.

We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.