I didn't have a record player.

I think music has gone through a period of something very severe, rather radical, rather the way painting did with cubism.

I don't have ideas so much as there are things which constantly evolve... there are various threads or layers, if you like, which change.

When I was confronted with official tuition, the academic thing, I could see no relationship whatever between that and the music I'd been writing since I was 11.

The opera tells the story with all the built-in contradictions and from many different angles.

The theatre only knows what it's doing next week, not like the opera, where they say: 'What are we going to do in five years' time?' A completely different attitude.

Music is such a problem in the time it takes.

People say my music is English. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's not me writing English music, but that English music is becoming more like me.

Minimalism now is a reaction to what came before. It's absolutely of its time. Music moved into the set theory thing, and moved out of it.

The thing about influence is that any composer worth anything will give you the same names.

My operas and my theatre works are very formal pieces.

Prayer means God of mercy have pity on us.

Mental acuity of any kind comes from solving problems yourself, not from being told how to solve them.

People tell you that you cannot, because they do not.

True freedom is in not having a master, but in making the master your slave

You can't curl up on the sofa and deny life forever. Life is always going to be a series of ouch-making moments, and the question was, was I going to go all fetal-position or was I going to woman up?

The wretchedness of ordinary life, endured so gaily when it is part of our normal existence, is made far worse when it comes as something new, and is exaggerated by the working of the imagination.

To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals - this alone is worth the struggle.

In good times, we all want to drop anchor, to stop in time! But man is condemned to move till the far end of the precipice!

Eternity is not an unending succession of days in the calendar, but something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality.

Few moments in life are more gratifying than those when the arrogant are exposed as the ignorant.