It took great courage to ask a beautiful young woman to marry me. Believe me, it is easier to play the whole Petrushka on the piano.
I have found that if you love life, life will love you back.
You cannot play the piano well unless you are singing within you.
When I play, I make love – it is the same thing.
What good are vitamins? Eat a lobster, eat a pound of caviar – live! If you are in love with a beautiful blonde with an empty face and no brains at all, don’t be afraid. Marry her! Live!
Sometimes I think, not so much am I a pianist, but a vampire. All my life I have lived off the blood of Chopin.
I’m a free person; I feel terribly free. They could put me in chains and I still would be free because my thoughts would be mine – and that’s all I want to have.
Of course there is no formula for success, except perhaps an unconditional acceptance of life, and what it brings.
Love life and life will love you back. Love people and they will love you back.
When I sit in Paris in a cafe, surrounded by people, I don’t sit casually – I go over a certain sonata in my head and discover new things all the time.
Music is not a hobby, not even a passion with me; music is me. I feel what people get out of me is this outlook on life, which comes out in my music. My music is the last expression of all that.
I am tired before the concert, not afterward.
The seasons are what a symphony ought to be: four perfect movements in harmony with each other.
We only begin to live life when we learn to accept it on its own terms.
Even when I’m sick and depressed, I love life.
I’m passionately involved in life: I love its change, its color, its movement. To be alive, to be able to see, to walk, to have houses, music, paintings – it’s all a miracle.
When I was young, I used to have successes with women because I was young. Now I have successes with women because I am old. Middle age was the hardest part.
Life is the game that must be played, this truth at least, good friends, we know; so live and laugh, nor be dismayed as one by one the phantoms go.
I feel that special secret current between the public and me. I can hold them with one little note in the air, and they will not breathe. That is a great, great moment.
My father, good or bad, mistakes or no, had a direct line from his heart to the music to the people, to the audience. He played with logic and his own inner truth.
Sometimes when I sit down to practice and there is no one else in the room, I have to stifle an impulse to ring for the elevator man and offer him money to come in and hear me.