Art is not only about angst.

The French Revolution is the ultimate modernist statement. Destroy everything. Don't build on the past. There is no past.

Jazz is not the popular culture. Jazz is in the same position in our culture as classical music. A very small minority of people really love it.

What I think of as style - and I've gotten to this over years of really thinking about it - is that style is the unconscious choices I make.

I have tremendous respect for film composers.

You become a great composer when you win a Pulitzer. But I think that now it's a completely meaningless award.

I find respect for a mediocre British composer, as opposed to a really good American, ridiculous because they automatically respect a composer if he's from England.

I'm glad I won it because when I grew up the Pulitzer was the award that every composer wanted and I was like that too.

I think it's good for the composer to teach because you always have new students and you have to begin at the beginning and make things clear.

Eighty percent of my pieces gravitate towards an A, as a tonal thing, not at the beginning, but somewhere in it.

I always conceive a piece as a different set of challenges.

A three-quarter moon, glowering bone, with a hint of something bruised, battered, scarred. The moon has endured more than anybody can know.

'Which is stronger, politics or love?' is like asking, 'Which is stronger, exhaling or inhaling?' They are two sides of the same thing.

It's sad when people break up.

In America, you complain about job losses because of China, but here, we carry all of the environmental costs.

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

Whatever you do, whether you're doing a television drama or a romantic comedy, you want to be relevant, to some degree.

I listen a lot to the incredible young artists who are coming through, which is something that just wasn't possible during Apartheid. That's the way I learn.

Contentment travels rarely with fortune, but follows virtue even in misfortune.

What is the right exchange rate at one point is not necessarily the right exchange rate at another.

There is one thing about knowing history, and another in recreating it.