Quotes from Stephen Hough

My principal commitment is playing the piano. But I always loved words.

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.

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 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 was such a lazy teenager: I didn't read or play the piano beyond the bare minimum.

Bach and Beethoven erected temples and churches on the heights. I only wanted to build dwellings for men in which they might feel happy and at home.

In anything, there has to be that moment of fasting, really, in order to enjoy the feast.

I love my painting - it fills me with passion. But it's not something I expect anyone else to love.

Once or twice, I've taken the Gideon Bible out of the drawer, opened it at random, and found myself stuck in the middle of a genealogical list. And that's when I thought: why not cherry-pick the best bits, passages that people can actually use?

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.

I don't think of faith as something that's like a rock, that never changes. I think it's something that's very fluid, always changing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Unlike a high-wire walker, I don't think any musician strikes the wires of a piano or draws a bow across a violin's strings primarily for the kick of an adrenalin fix. There is danger on stage, but dropped notes are not broken bones; a memory lapse is not a tumble to the ground.

I haven't studied theology in any systematic way. I don't think I'd find certain subjects - canon law, for instance - terribly interesting. But I'm always picking around and finding different things.

If they say they don't like the way I play Beethoven, then I can swallow that, and maybe they're right. But if they don't like what I've written, then it's about me.

I enjoy painting. It's an incredible release of tension, and I feel very excited doing it. I squeeze out some wonderful red paint, and I get a thrill. My heart starts beating faster. It's almost a sensual thing working with these thick acrylic paints. I almost want to put my hands in.

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.

Restaurants should be forced to recycle their leftovers for animal consumption - and should create fewer leftovers in the first place.

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 think there are very few people that I would give the title of genius to, really, but Beethoven unquestionably is one of them.