Stephen Hough

I've loved Alfred Cortot's playing from an early age, and I never tire of hearing his recordings, particularly Chopin and Schumann from the 1920s and '30s.

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.

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.'

I was out of the U.K. as a care-free, fun-loving student for much of Mrs. Thatcher's time in Downing Street, and as I didn't own a television in New York, never read the newspapers, and am old enough to have lived before the Internet, she is a shadowy figure in my memory.

The Internet tempts us to think that because an email or a new website can be accessed in seconds that everything works at the same instant speed. Art is more like the growth of a plant. It needs time and space.

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.

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.

The hierarchy is set out for me. The first priority is piano. I have to be 101 percent prepared. I find that at other times of the day, if the creative juices are working, I might want to write or compose.

I would do a sort of violence to myself if I didn't express myself in the directly creative ways of writing, both words and music.

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.

Few occupations pass the solitary hours more fruitfully than the playing of a musical instrument.

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.