Stephen Hough

“My place in London is very small, so a piano would take up a third of the room. I leave home in the morning when I'm there and go to my studio. I close the door, and it's soundproof. There's no phone or TV or computer, and I can work uninterruptedly. That has been a huge advantage over the years.”

“In the bit of painting that I've done, I'm interested in colour and texture. I'm very interested in transparency.”

“I enjoy painting. It's an incredible release of tension, and I feel very excited doing it. I squeeze out some wonderful red paint, and I get a thrill. My heart starts beating faster. It's almost a sensual thing working with these thick acrylic paints. I almost want to put my hands in.”

“I don't listen to music a lot in that I rarely sit down and put on a CD because I really want to treasure the silence that is there when I'm not practising. But when I listen to a piece, I listen to it often.”

“I was only listening to rock music, burning joss sticks in my bedroom, wanting only to be a disc jockey, and watching six hours of television a night - the worst kind of teenage alienation.”

“Classical music thinks in centuries, not four-year terms.”

“I want music to move me, and I don't think it can do that without at least a link to tonality. It's the tug between atonal and tonal which makes music poignant.”

“There are many doors to the heart.”

“There must be so many people who have various artistic talents that, for whatever reason, just have no way of expressing them. Either they have no support from their family or they live in a part of the world, maybe they've never heard a piano or seen a piano.”

“I don't think of faith as something that's like a rock, that never changes. I think it's something that's very fluid, always changing.”

“Before Liszt, a conductor was someone who just facilitated the performance, who would keep people together or beat the time, indicate the entries. After Liszt, that was no longer the case; a conductor was someone who shaped the music in an intense musical way, who played the orchestra as an instrument.”

“I have had a place in New York in the musicians' district on the Upper West Side since 1986.”

“I'm not really a professional composer; I just compose now and then when someone asks me to.”

“There's certainly no doubt that commercialism has entered classical music to such a degree that almost no one seems to care anymore about the physical and mental health of the performer.”

“At moments of acute joy or sorrow, men and women throughout history have sung or reached for musical instruments to express the inexpressible. When minds are taut with emotional entanglement, there seems to be an inner compulsive instinct to release and harness this tension through the measured vibrations in the air that we call music.”

“America has been central to my life.”

“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.”

“I remember, in school during English lessons, I would ask the teacher what were the most difficult books to read, and when she'd say 'Ulysses' or something, I'd run off to the library to check out a copy, eager to attempt the most difficult mountain.”

“A priest once said to me, 'Think of a priest going to the altar as you walk out on the stage.' I would hate to think that anyone thought I was coming to preach. But art and music open up things that you can't put into words. It's about bringing joy when you go out there.”

“For about four years, all I did was watch television. I suppose my parents should have stopped me.”