I work very fast, keeping the ideas flowing but making sure they come out the way I intended.

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.

Change is just the vehicle to elevate you toward the ultimate destinations.

That's another piece of advice: Don't go to college follow your dreams. Unless you're a doctor - then go to college.

I would have to say that looked like it hurt.

Sometimes to love is easy, but to accept love is hard.

[Albert] Camus' was born in Algeria of French nationality, and was assimilated into the French colony, although the French colonists rejected him absolutely because of his poverty.

My body shape was made to get into the perfect aerodynamic position.

Never met a wise man, if so its a woman.

Let us not aspire to four-year goals but rather forty-year goals.

Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.

The best timed joke or the best timed phrase comes at spontaneous moments and just relies on me as the host to be very quick, and that's what I do.