Craft is part of the creative process.

There's another way of making music, by touching the lives and feelings of ordinary people.

The academic area of new music or modern music festivals is not something which attracts me at all.

Still, American composers working in France have had a pretty hard time.

I have friends who have a CD mastering plant in Hollywood and they are very sceptical about European record labels' understanding of digital technology.

Similarly you can make a transition from one set of instruments to another imperceptibly.

I am writing something which I find satisfying and which I am prepared to put my name to as a composer.

Music history has flowed under the bridges for many years.

I remember once, when I started writing for the alto saxophone, a saxophonist told me to think of it as being like a cross between an oboe and a viola, but louder.

Writing tonal music now, you are not writing into the 19th Century.

It's rather like attending a university seminar where you are talking to a few gifted specialists who deliver a paper to an audience of their peers. That's one way of making music.

Even God has a hell: his love of Mankind.

In some warped way, having an embalmed body with us made perfect sense.

It is certain that at certain times talent entirely overcomes thought or poetry.

The mirror crack'd from side to side "The curse has come upon me," cried The Lady of Shalott

I just got an iPhone, which is cool, but I don't download movies, I don't watch Hulu, I don't have Netflix. I don't do any of that. But I do geek out to music.

I don't mind losing, but I don't like losing to cheats.

I'm pathetic when it comes to the Internet and getting stuff done.

Only I keep wishing I could think of a way...to show the Capitol they don't own me. That I'm more than just a piece in their Games.

We are all born creative. We just got it educated out of us.

It is an essential tenet of our whole representative form of government, the idea that there should not be some tyranny which makes it so nobody can even have a chance to vote.