If you aim at anything lower that is expecting your audience to be really alert and aware, then you're going to be caught out sooner or later as a composer.

You don't underestimate either players or audience in any circumstances.

An audience shouldn't listen with complacency.

If you don't get feedback from your performers and your audience, you're going to be working in a vacuum.

The establishment in Britain is certainly against the arts and against education. If something doesn't make a profit, it's invalid, and art doesn't make a profit in that sense.

At the moment, in Britain we're facing such enormous cutbacks in education programs and music programs and art programs that you feel you are knocking your head against a brick wall.

Recently I've been participating in radio and television talk programs doing broadcasts and conferences, and shooting my mouth off and really going to town.

I recently did a piece for the Boston Pops and John Williams, and I hope that it's as well a composed piece as I've ever done for any other medium or occasion.

You can't pander to your audience. You might in the short term, but ultimately you can't hoodwink them, either.

I know what I want at least, and the older I get I think I'm better at getting it out of players and singers.

I'm not actually teaching any more, but I am writing pieces for schools all the time, and for kids.

We have to recognise that there cannot be relationships unless there is commitment, unless there is loyalty, unless there is love, patience, persistence.

The problem with this generation is they are so quick to define who they are in the process of searching. It is their need for immediate acceptance that keeps them from exploring further.

Hope has as many lives as a cat or a king.

For me, baseball is the most nourishing game outside of literature. They both are re-tellings of human experience.

If you can't have a good time and smile and relate to people across race and class, then the success that you have ultimately is just sounding brass and tinkling symbol.

In every thriller written about Washington, particularly after 9/11, there are good guys and there are bad guys, and there's no gray area at all.

A busy schedule can be difficult, but I have the best husband on the planet. He supports my endeavors, and we work as a team.

You should neither play bad compositions, nor, unless compelled, listen to them.

We have sown a seed... Instead of a half-formed Europe, we have a Europe with a legal entity, with a single currency, common justice, a Europe which is about to have its own defence.