I think that one of the things that influences me most as a composer is to what extent I can deconstruct and reconstruct the material that I'm working with.

As an improviser I'm now pretty comfortable with trios, so I'm thinking of working up to quartets.

There's an awful lot of resources that can be drawn upon in an improvised music concert.

Improvised music involves a lot of intuition and I like developing intuition.

It's like learning a language; you can't speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language, and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar.

If you write songs you have an idea how they're going to sound.

I remember playing football dressed in peculiar costumes with some friends in France and laughing so hard we couldn't even stand up, let alone kick the ball.

We play melodic music, we play songs, we play all kinds of things and when you improvise you don't just shut out different languages, you use all the languages that you have.

I don't know if I'm striving for anything that I can put into words.

If you mean do I use the guitar when I'm sitting at home writing stuff, then basically no, never. All I would ever write would be stuff that my fingers easily fall into.

Well, I think music for kids is never anything but experimental is it?

We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

A general cry of "What book? What book? Let us see this famous book!

No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.

The present is no more exempt from the sneer of the future than the past has been.

Universal literacy was a 20th-century goal. Before then, reading and writing were skills largely confined to a small, highly educated class of professional people.

At twelve I looked like a girl of seventeen. My body was developed and shapely. I still wore the blue dress and the blouse the orphanage provided. They made me look like an overgrown lummox.

First the doctor told me the good news: I was going to have a disease named after me.

The poor are too busy working to need justice.