I wanted to play piano, and that slid quickly into writing - it wasn't enough to play other people's notes: I had to write notes too.

Whereas Schaeffer and Henry were working like samplers, their idea was to capture those sounds which couldn't be serially calibrated because they were too complex in character.

I have problems with machines which aren't gestural.

I probably went to musique concrete concerts - though not the very first ones - at the beginning of the 50s.

Electronic music used pure sounds, completely calibrated. You had to think digitally, as it were, in a way that allowed you to extend serial ideas into other parameters through technology.

Well, first I studied piano. I wasn't very satisfied because I though my teachers were dumb... and repressive.

My sisters were going out with artists and poets, and eventually it was the creative world which attracted me.

I was born in Paris, and I haven't moved, except until now - I live in the suburbs and I hate it.

Boulez seemed to me to be a guy who wrote laws. Like a company lawyer.

With the piano I'm completely in control of the gestural situation-not that I'm going to play the piece myself, but I know what's difficult, what's impossible.

The world's biggest tree, the redwood tree was once a little nut that just kept growing regardless of weather.

Quantum theory was split up into dialects. Different people describe the same experiences in remarkably different languages. This is confusing even to physicists.

I gleaned more practical psychology and psychiatry from the Bible, than from all other books!

The Senate used to be a place of great debate and accomplishment. Now it is run like a dictatorship shutting out the voices of millions of Americans.

Women have seen that they have locked themselves up with feminist writing.

[...] to judge from the Internet postings that people have sent me, probably most of what you learned [about me] was nonsense.

A protective tariff is a typical conspiracy in restraint of trade.

Every city I go to is an opportunity to paint, whether it's Omaha or Hawaii.

If everyone could learn that what is right for me does not make it right for anyone else, the world would be a much happier place.

The aim of medicine is to prevent disease and prolong life, the ideal of medicine is to eliminate the need of a physician.