"I don't know of any great performer who hasn't suffered terrible stage fright. ... Performers don't like speak about it because they're ashamed of it. ... You should be proud of it because it's a sign that you're responsible. If you weren't responsible, you wouldn't experience stage fright."
"I always had an urge to be creative. And practicing 8 hours a day to give concerts, which you have to do, you know, and then teaching the rest of the day? No time to be creative. ... Like most performers I did suffer stage fright and I never liked the way I performed in public because of it. And I said, 'I'm gonna stick to this untill I can perform in spite of my stage fright.' Well, I did, I succeeded in doing that. There's no secret about it, you just have to be properly prepared. [But] nobody speaks about that, ... they speak about psychotherapy, pills that you can take. 'Do everything under the sun what you should eat on the day of your performance, but nobody ever speaks about being properly prepared. I started to perform better than I did in my living room. And I said to myself, 'you have to be good to yourself at this stage of your life. Now give it up and devote your time to being creative'. ... This is what I feel about being creative. When we give concerts like that some of the great artists today, that's not being creative, that's being recreative. ... My personal feeling is that in terms of developing ourselves fully, the combiation of being recreative and creative does the trick."
"I'll tell you one of the virtues of being my age. ... When you get older, you stop playing games and you stop saying what people expect you to say. And you start saying the truth."
"I adored teaching. You know what I love best about teaching? I love the feeling of making a pupil feel good about themselves. ... That's one of the great things about teaching. You make people better."
"When you do something for someone else, it temporarily distracts you from your own vulneralbility. ... You do it for someone else, the ego ceases to exist. You're not important."