An audience shouldn't listen with complacency.

You don't underestimate either players or audience in any circumstances.

If you don't get feedback from your performers and your audience, you're going to be working in a vacuum.

The establishment in Britain is certainly against the arts and against education. If something doesn't make a profit, it's invalid, and art doesn't make a profit in that sense.

If you aim at anything lower that is expecting your audience to be really alert and aware, then you're going to be caught out sooner or later as a composer.

At the moment, in Britain we're facing such enormous cutbacks in education programs and music programs and art programs that you feel you are knocking your head against a brick wall.

Recently I've been participating in radio and television talk programs doing broadcasts and conferences, and shooting my mouth off and really going to town.

I recently did a piece for the Boston Pops and John Williams, and I hope that it's as well a composed piece as I've ever done for any other medium or occasion.

You can't pander to your audience. You might in the short term, but ultimately you can't hoodwink them, either.

I know what I want at least, and the older I get I think I'm better at getting it out of players and singers.

I'm not actually teaching any more, but I am writing pieces for schools all the time, and for kids.

Sometimes you must slow down to see that the world isnt spinning, rather its your own mind which makes things turn

I'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it.

Yesterday was the first day of the rest of your life . . . and you messed it up again.

I was certified to take x-rays, but you can't just show up and start cleaning people's teeth.

Life is precious. Life is sacred. And it ought so to be observed.

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

Do you know how a man makes his way here? By brilliant genius or by skilful corruption. You must either cut your way through these masses of men like a cannon ball, or steal among them like a plague.

I learned from my Adventist upbringing that the biggest sins were sexual.

I look at radio as gone … Piracy is the new radio, that’s how music gets around.

Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes, work never begun. Change your thoughts and you change your world.