Being on a musical quest was something I always enjoyed.

I was a catastrophe at Science and Games, but the good thing about Quaker schools is that they encourage you in those subjects for which you show an aptitude.

I am proud to be able to claim that, from the age of nineteen, I've managed to earna living entirely as a composer.

When I came across something I liked, I wanted to find out as much as I could about it. This was as true of hearing Hoagy Carmichael for the first time as it was later when I first heard Boulez.

I realized very early that I was never going to make by living by writing string quartets. But I wanted to write music and I didn't want to have to do anything else.

I hated teaching composition. I was playing music I didn't particularly want to play, being on committees I didn't want to be on.

I just scribbled away and eventually a C-major chord was there. I didn't ever decide I was going to be a composer. It was like being tall. It's what I was. It's what I did.

People ask what was the first piece of music I wrote. There was no first piece.

I wanted to write music, and cook, and play cards, and have a nice time.

The only thing worse than not having your dream come true is having it come true for a little while.

Monotonous talk of the end of American hegemony, the universal cliché of the period, is mostly a way of avoiding mounting a serious opposition to it.

The scientific attitude of mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interest of the desire to know.

I just want my relationship to be more for myself rather than a public statement.

You need self-confidence and determination: feeling depressed and losing hope will never really help to correct any situation.

I attempt to write a good novel. Whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe.

What does it mean that social structures among young people are so often predicated upon trying really, really hard to appear to not-be-trying?

As long as you don't make waves, ripples, life seems easy. But that's condemning yourself to impotence and death before you are dead.

I would love to see some comedies about loser women.

We don't have ways of resolving the arguments in idea meritocratic way.