I have a lot of interests. I daydreamed about various career options growing up; the one I'm in is the first one that worked out, and I love it, so I feel very lucky.

That word 'prodigy' has such a derogatory implication. It is used to describe people who are forced to play a lot of concerts very early, people whose audience comes because of their youth, people who are exploited. None of the above really applied to me.

I think the things that I learned that stick with me are things you often repeat, even today, which is never stop learning.

What I do is creative. It doesn't seem like that when I'm playing a piece that was written in the past, but the score is just the outline and everything in it is relative. The key is to make this piece written by someone else belong to you and then connect to the audience.

As people do better, they start voting like Republicans - unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing.

Education needs to be personalized and flexible, which means education policy needs to originate from our local communities and not from some bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.

The diagnosis that poverty, lack of education, or lack of opportunities have much to do with terrorism requires a fundamentally optimistic view of human nature. This diagnosis leads to the prognosis that all we need to do to solve the terrorism problem is to create societies that are less poor, better educated and have more opportunities.

There is definitely a need for increasing capacity in higher education; a large part of this is being met in the technical education segment by the private sector and in the non-technical by the state sector. In the public sector, we will do whatever we can afford.