“It’s very difficult to put it in words, because what I find especially beautiful about music is that it’s really stronger than words.”

“It leaves you breathless.”

“People were yearning for music as comfort - not as an escape, but as a way to process what was happening.”

"But in chamber music, if you’re open enough, you can come to identify with others people’s ideas as much as your own and when that comes out in the music it’s beautiful. And that’s the point of it all.”

"Somehow my memory is more vivid when I have music attached to it.”

“You have to go into the roots of the music, to the meaning of the notes, then you will again have a direct connection to what it used to be.”

“In the midst of awakening, it’s hard to make any kind of work that isn’t trying to work against the status quo.”

“When I was playing his First String Quartet, there was a moment in the slow movement when I felt emotionally like I was in the audience, even though I was performing.”

“It feels like the world has opened up. The question is: How do you balance that with the tradition that we have?"

“You can tell that there’s something really magical. You just don’t know what it is.”

"It has such an enormous eruptive power— it is extremely emotional, but also childlike at times.”

“I do my best to be as faithful to my inner voice as I possibly can, because the joy and fulfillment that that brings me is the reason I started composing in the first place.”

“I really didn’t like it when I first heard it. But now I love it. It took me time, I really really had to work on it. And then I realized that it’s a masterpiece.”