Things can be really empty in this world, and I don't just mean the music world. It can become a very meaningless place if you don't really understand: 'who am I? Why am I here? What am I doing?' To feel fulfilment and have a deeper level of understanding, personally, that is the most important thing.

When I was first learning songs, I'd have a favorite song, and I'd take the chords and twist them around. I'd learn the chords and then play them backward. That was my first experimenting with writing a song.

We have the potential to help people out of poverty, out of disease, out of slavery and out of conflict. Too often, we turn the other way because we think there's nothing we can do.

I find myself to be truly primal and passionate. Everything I do comes from a primal place.

One day, it hit me that music is my calling. I just started playing and writing music. How, I don't know. I just started doing it, and then this big voice came out of my mouth. And it felt like I was releasing something.

I love film - it's like painting.

I can't understand Urdu, Bahasa or Russian, but when the Pakistani Faiz, the Indonesian Rendra and the Russian Rosdentvensky declaim, I can feel the living throb of rhythm and music, the warmth and passion of their poetry, as do the hundreds, not a mere roomful, of poetry lovers in the audience.

I'm actually doing what I like doing, which is mixing opera music and classical music with soul and folk. And I was writing and talking about what I've actually experienced, and I don't think that's very common.