"People assume I always wanted to be a violinist. It was actually just one of many other hobbies that I had. I had very enthusiastic parents. They gave me swimming lessons and horseback riding and gymnastics and ballet. My mom put me on the piano when I was about 3i. I asked for the violin when I was 4 because I wanted something that was smaller and more portable. I auditioned for the Juilliard School when I was about 6. During the week, I went to a regular school in Philadelphia so I could be with kids my own age." and "I started my career when I was 8 with two debuts in New York and Philadelphia, and then I started recording when I was 9. When you're so young, you don't realize the impact of a New York Philharmonic debut. You're told to do something and you go out and do it and you don't ask too many questions. I think the questions come later when you're in your teens. By the time I was 14, I was spending probably half the year in Europe. So I was out of school a lot. I did most of my homework by e-mail or fax. We made it work because my professors were incredible."

“I hate analyzing stuff. I do the bare minimum. When it comes to interpretation, I just play it and go from there. I think emotion is everything. When you get the notes, you've just scratched the surface. The best things happen spontaneously, on stage. I'm doing three concerts here; I guarantee that none of them will be the same. We're not machines.”

“I've worked with a lot of living composers recently. It drives me nuts, though, that they like to change things at the last minute. For example, two years ago I played a piece that had been completed only the day before, in front of thousands of people in a huge stadium in Taejon, South Korea.”

“I like Lenny Kravitz, I like Pink, and for forever and ever I've thought that Whitney Houston has an amazing voice. I really love great voices.”

“There are certain moments in performance when I'm hand-in-glove with a conductor and feel I can take risks and try something completely different from what we did in rehearsal. Sometimes we pull it off, and it's magical. Other times you try to get creative, the support isn't there, and you think, oh well, maybe next time.”

“Now this is very funny because my brother's name is Michael Chang, I go in for interviews or just talk to people and they say, "so what does your brother do?" I say he plays tennis and they automatically assume that he is Michael Chang, the tennis player, and I don't say anything.”

“I had this very interesting experience when I was about 13. I went to Finland and it was dead in the middle of winter. It was freezing cold. There was so much snow and I went to Ainola, which is Sibelius' house. It was completely isolated -- just snow and forest, trees and the lake, completely beautiful but very quiet. And very serene. And I thought, well, this is where he was composing his stuff. And his great symphonies and the violin concerto, this is where it basically came from. I also got this little handbook about Ainola and there's a part that says that Sibelius wouldn't allow running water in his house because it disturbed him and his thought processes. So his daughters had to go out to the well which was half a mile away and then bring back water. So I thought, "Wow!" This person was really that much into control and silence. So you go and look at the concerto after that and the way it starts in the beginning: very shimmery. Very beautiful. But in a way it is isolated, and you feel kind of lonely when you're playing that. And gradually of course it builds up into this great big climax when every single orchestra-like instrument known to mankind is clashing and you're trying to break out there and you're trying to play your heart out. But really it did help me realize what he is like.”