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.

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

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.

Out of silence is born concentration, and from that comes learning.

Different people's houses smell like different weird things. God forbid someone should come and nail down what my house smells like. It'd probably be a litter box... sweaty socks... and burnt bacon. That probably is what it smells like.

My own faith was nurtured by my grandmother and her clinging deeply to her faith when she was dying a painful and slow death from cancer.

About all I can say for the United States Senate is that it opens with a prayer and closes with an investigation.

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.