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.

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

I didn't have a record player.

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.

To achieve peace, we needed to have a war to start with.

Freedom is based on the anarch’s awareness that he can kill himself. He carries this awareness around

I'd been exposed to alternate ways of thinking and it seriously affected the way my mother had reared me.

Finn was different.And he was different because she wanted him in her left in a way she hadn't wanted anyone for a very long time.Maybe ever.

What ever disunites man from God, also disunites man from man.

After Watergate, which happened when I was in college, I became increasingly inspired by journalism as a way to change the world. It sounds corny, but to wake the public up, to serve a higher cause.

I would like to compare football and cinema. I think it's very similar. It's two games... different games. You have to work very hard and find the confidence to enjoy it on the pitch or in the film.

One man may be more cunning than another, but no one can be more cunning than all the world.

I can not forget Melina Mercouri in black dress at 'Never on Sunday'.

That's how it goes within a family. You think you know each other so well, and so you don't bother hardly getting to know each other at all.