Stephen Hough

“Learning great works like the Liszt Sonata or Beethoven's 'Hammerklavier' should be a struggle to a certain extent, where you need to labor intensely with your own brain and soul for the meaning of the work instead of cutting and pasting a bunch of stuff together from the Internet and - boom! - there you are with a performance ready to go.”

“Musicians keep playing when the lights go out, when people are suffering, confused, or angry.”

“I love listening to things like those wonderful piano pieces of Stockhausen. It's just not my thing as a composer or performer, and thank goodness we're not obliged to be Modernist any more.”

“Bach and Beethoven erected temples and churches on the heights. I only wanted to build dwellings for men in which they might feel happy and at home.”

“Freedom comes with the impossibility of choosing.”

“Debussy is one of the few composers who actually created a new sound on the piano - or perhaps we should say a new smell, so perfumed are the vibrations which emanate from the instrument.”

“I think there are very few people that I would give the title of genius to, really, but Beethoven unquestionably is one of them.”

“Brahms is life-changing every time. And though I love him, I can't say that about Mompou.”

“When you're a kid, Beethoven is Beethoven, but as I've grown older, my astonishment at the sheer inventiveness of the man has increased, and I have an appreciation that I didn't have when I was in my 20s.”

“I don't watch television! At least not when I'm traveling. For some reason, I have always found it depressing to watch television in hotel rooms. I try to use that time, as well as time on planes, to write.”

“Unlike a high-wire walker, I don't think any musician strikes the wires of a piano or draws a bow across a violin's strings primarily for the kick of an adrenalin fix. There is danger on stage, but dropped notes are not broken bones; a memory lapse is not a tumble to the ground.”

“Restaurants should be forced to recycle their leftovers for animal consumption - and should create fewer leftovers in the first place.”

“Playing the piano is incredibly personal... But when it's your own piece, it's doubly so.”

“No two composers were more totally at home in front of the piano than Debussy and Chopin, hands to keys to strings to sound waves to pen and paper in one perfect gesture of inspiration.”

“I've twice been on the point of giving up my performing career to train for the priesthood.”

“I've always written - about music, art, things going on around the world. The danger is that it becomes too personal. I don't think people want it at that level of intimacy.”

“In anything, there has to be that moment of fasting, really, in order to enjoy the feast.”

“I really feel something's missing if I'm not writing.”

“I was very quick; I did nothing but play the piano apart from being at school. I was at home with my mother, saying, 'Go out and get some fresh air.' No, I wanted to play the piano all the time I could. I was completely obsessed.”

“I think the actual art of expressing yourself is a very important part of being human. And an important part of being a performer is understanding what it's like to create yourself.”