"If you want a nine-to-five existence with weekends off then don't be a musician. I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing n…"

"I didn't go to school until I was 11. On your own you develop imagination."

"My education was very intensive and I applied that training later on to playing the piano. I had always played, but h…"

"I can see it must seem strange, but to me it was normality. Really, my memory of my childhood is that the sun always …"

"Not only was I fiddling around at the keyboard but there were all these other children of all backgrounds wanting to …"

"School was strange, rather amusing - with a teacher standing at the front telling you what to write. The camaraderie …"

"What was most odd was that teachers would tell you what to do and what to think and they would write everything on a …"

"I wasn't part of that hothouse thing. I didn't go to the Yehudi Menuhin school. I grew up with the idea of trying to …"

"I'm trained quite classically but quite freely by my mum, so even when I was little, I had this rather freewheeling a…"

"I quite like shutting the door, putting the answering machine on and sitting at the piano for six or seven hours."