If they say they don't like the way I play Beethoven, then I can swallow that, and maybe they're right. But if they don't like what I've written, then it's about me.

Unlike sport, music is not about winning or keeping fit or promoting your town or school; it's about celebrating, to a level approaching ecstasy, the deepest human longings.

Life is an incurable disease leading to death, but it's also an unrequested gift, which, if we can manage to keep giving it away to others, can keep giving back everything to us.

All things of beauty can speak to us of God, and I'm very happy to listen to and be inspired by people of every religious background.

Live in the present moment. The past and future are nonexistent. Only the present can be grasped or, better, embraced.

In Britten or Berg, there's a tension between the sweet and the sour, between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the tonal and the atonal, the happy and the sad. That, to me, is what all western art is about - that tension. It's why we want to say anything at all.