"I can't read music. Instead, I'd do stuff inside the piano, do harmonics and all kinds of crazy things. They used to put me in these annual piano contests down at Long Beach City College, and two years in a row, I won first prize - out of like 5,000 kids! The judges were like, 'Very interesting interpretation!' I thought I was playing it right."

"I never took guitar lessons. I took classical piano lessons from the age of six when we lived in Holland. And when we moved to America, it was just the typical thing except I was really good at it so was my brother."

"I just consider myself slightly left-of-center. I'm not your average bear. I - what's the word? I'm not - normal."

"I never took guitar lessons. I took classical piano lessons from the age of six when we lived in Holland."

"I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale."

"There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't."

"The river of time washes away kings and empires, leaving only virtue intact. This remains the cornerstone of personal mastery."

"The best way to predict your future is to create it."