Stephen Hough

“If I'm walking along the street, ideas come. Ideas about things that I'm interested in. I've jotted them down in the past on bits of paper and then, more recently, on apps in my phone. I've always written poetry since I was a kid.”

“Food waste is an atrocity that is reducible, if not completely avoidable.”

“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.”

“Most people are at a concert because they want to be inspired, entertained, moved; we musicians have the mission to be bringers of joy, of ecstasy.”

“They both changed the way we hear the sound of the piano, both of them inventors of sonority: Chopin took bel canto singing lines and reproduced them on the keyboard above richly upholstered counterpoint; Debussy somehow preserved vibrations in the air, blending their ephemeral magic into music that reaches far back into deep memory.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I love food, but if I find a restaurant I like in a new city, I can eat every meal there, and sometimes I do... and even sometimes the same dish.”

“I like the extras in life. Concentrating on serious things doesn't mean you can't also enjoy the lighter ones.”

“It's so easy for all the success in the world to suddenly end, and I'm quite aware of that.”

“There are artists who delight listeners with their wild and daring individuality; there are others who uncover the written score with reverence. There are few who can do both.”

“If you are not living in the same area when you are looking for property, it is a nightmare because you come down for a day or two, have appointments to see places, and have to be able to make instant decisions before flying off to St. Louis or somewhere.”

“If 'ecstasy' means to stand outside ourselves, then what better ambition can there be as we wait in the wings of the Royal Albert Hall: to leave self-obsession behind and take the audience on a journey across the high wire of Beethoven or the flying trapeze of Liszt.”

“I wanted to be a monk at some time in my life, or a priest, so there was a kind of reflex quite early on not to be attached to anything that might be taken away.”

“Schubert, Franck, and Liszt were all Roman Catholics who questioned or doubted or lived in different ways, and religion was certainly part of all their lives.”

“It's very hard to come up with ideal situations... With different moods and the difficulties of traveling around, I often play my best under the worst conditions.”

“The 'Rhapsody' has a lean, modern, American feel about it, whereas with Rachmaninoff's second and third concertos, you feel very much you're still in old imperial Russia.”

“The piano is an instrument that can easily sound overly thick, and I love to think that I can work with textures - particularly the inner textures inside the melody or the bass line. There is an analogy there with painting; I love paintings where you see colour underneath the colour and, underneath that, more texture and shape.”

“I didn't want to look back in 10 or 20 years and say, 'Yes, I always wanted to write that piano sonata or that novel, but I never had time.'”

“Where prominent writers are expected to have a socially, politically responsible voice, musicians sometimes find meaning only in the voice which produces melodies with vocal chords.”