When I started writing full time I had not long stopped being a teacher and when at last I had a full day to write, I would put music on and wonder to myself - am I allowed to do this? Then I thought: 'I am control of this and no one is telling me what I can do.'

I got picked on a lot, even by teachers too. I liked to listen to musicals and bake, and my homeroom teacher found out and mocked me in front of the whole class for baking.

When I graduated from high school, the teacher said I was throwing my life away following music, and the same teacher invited me back to speak at the school. I don't say that to brag, I just want to be an example.

I was a teacher for a long time. I taught at a community college: voice, theory, humanities. And nowadays, music education is a dying thing. Funding is being cut more and more and more.

Ironically, for a few million people in the Far East, I did become an English teacher through my music.

The message of music was also the first thing what I learned from my first teacher. She was an organist too and she was very devoted to what she played, so she had a respect for every piece and she felt that she is not allowed to add something of her own.

Before I got Doctor Who, I went to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. I went back to take the final grade exam, which is the grade you have to take before you can take the teacher's diploma.

I got started when I was 3 years old because my father was a music teacher and my lessons were free. Instead of learning to walk, you learn to play the piano.

I remember a moment when the Prince went back to his old school, Grammar School in Melbourne, and slightly to his horror his old music teacher produced a cello.

I started studying music at the age of five and a half. My older sister was taking piano lessons. When her teacher left our apartment, I would get up on the piano bench and start picking out the notes that were part of my sister's lessons.

I always wrote music for my friends, but my focus was on playing piano. I didn't think I'd be quite good enough to be a soloist, but I believed that if I worked hard enough, I could work as a player, a teacher.

My mother was a very talented pianist, and she was a music teacher who hated to teach music, actually, but she loved to play, so I was brought up with Chopin, Debussy and Mozart.

I've always been a music fan. I played trumpet. When I was in 4th grade, we were getting demos from the music teacher about different instruments we could play, and I said I wanted to play the trumpet right away. It was easy: it just had three valves.

At art school, a teacher said: 'The best paintings are when you get lost in a piece of work and start painting in a stream of consciousness.' I wanted to do music, not art, so started writing lyrics that way. The first song I wrote was called 'Ice Cream and Wafers.' The next was 'Holding Back the Years.'

I was the only one in my family to be musically inclined, and my mother loved that. It encouraged my grand aunt to find me a music teacher, because it was quite obvious music was in me.

When you are studying jazz, the best thing to do is listen to records or listen to live music. It isn't as though you go to a teacher. You just listen as much as you can and absorb everything.

Once I understood Bach's music, I wanted to be a concert pianist. Bach made me dedicate my life to music, and it was that teacher who introduced me to his world.

Musicians are like a preacher, a teacher, an actor. You are the mediator who can transfer the energy of beautiful music to the others.

I think there are so many ways to become interested in music. I believe signs of sustained interest gives a sense of the right time. Music, if thought of as a language, would perhaps indicate that as early as possible is not so bad. I do believe that a really nurturing first teacher that makes the child love something is crucial.

Christine Bass was my high school music teacher. She took a program on its last legs and within a few years turned into one of the best programs in the country. Our high school dominated national choir competitions all through her 20-plus year tenure.

My parents being Bengali, we always had music in our house. My nani was a trained classical singer, who taught my mum, who, in turn, was my first teacher. Later I would travel almost 70 kms to the nearest town, Kota, to learn music from my guru Mahesh Sharmaji, who was also the principal of the music college there.

Doo-wop is the true music to me, man. Doo-wop was what nurtured me and grew me into who I am, and I guess even when I was in school, the teacher probably thought I had ADD or something every day, because I'd be beating on the desks, singing like the Flamingos or the Spaniels or Clyde McPhatter or somebody.

I don't want to be entertained. I don't want visuals or musicals. I don't want a vacation. I don't want to quit. I don't want sympathy. The cry of my heart is 'Just Give Me Jesus.'

It's hard for me to think of others because I'm not particularly in sympathy with the music of this century.