Hilary Hahn

“When we talk about music, we tend to place our experiences into one of two categories: making the music and listening to it. Delineating the two seems practical and obvious. In reality, though, there are a lot of opportunities for overlap, and it doesn't matter how you get into the music as long as you connect with it.”

“If you start censoring what you're interested in for the audience, you don't give the audience enough credit.”

“I guess I just like the idea of digging things up. Although I used to be scared of human skeletons.”

“I have always enjoyed literature classes, and I took a fiction workshop for writing and analyzing at Curtis... I don't know if would do it professionally, but it's nice to have the balance with the music.”

“It's fine with me if people want to applaud between movements of a concerto. It doesn't bother me - it's part of performance experience.”

“There's so many different ways to play Mozart.”

“The encore should wrap up the audience's experience of the piece you just played.”

“I'm more creative the more rules I have - note values, tempos, dynamic markings. Somehow, I find that really inspiring.”

“I don't really compare myself to anybody. That would be very unhealthy.”

“One challenge, if you do a website, a Youtube channel, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Ping, other things like that, is you don't have time to be an artist. As a performer, you need to practice.”

“When I was younger, I felt more like a student working with a mentor when I worked with the conductor, but now it feels more like equals.”

“I go a lot to Korea and Japan.”

“When you have a teacher who is part of a tradition, the other people in that tradition are such stars. You just look at them like pop stars.”

“Is there such a thing as a normal childhood?”

“What I find really interesting is, whenever you see the person who gives you the portrait of yourself, the portrait seems to be a combination of their face and your face.”

“The nice thing about the violin repertoire is that it's small enough that you can plan on learning everything at some point - whereas the piano repertoire is so enormous it wouldn't be possible unless you're a learning machine.”

“My teacher was still practicing Bach until his death at 89. I have no doubt that if I live that long, I'll be doing the same thing.”

“Kids would come up to me after concerts and give me drawings they've made of violins or, you know, landscapes with a violin floating in it or some sketch of a concert or a portrait of me.”

“One of the most rewarding things is meeting someone after a concert who has never been to a concert before. It is incredibly rewarding when they say, 'This is my first classical concert.' It is really exciting for everyone.”

“It's easy to be a prodigy. It's really hard to keep pushing in new directions.”