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.

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.

One thing I'm doing on the new Titanic recording is actually bringing in different acoustic spaces.

Fire wants to burn Water wants to flow Air wants to rise Earth wants to bindChaos wants to devourCal wants to live

A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.

There is a war that makes us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.

Water is our most precious resource, but we waste it, just as we waste other resources, including oil and gas.

There are a lot of very beautiful people in world. I'd love to tell you who my pin-ups are now, but I might meet them.

A person who is severely impaired never knows his hidden sources of strength until he is treated like a normal human being and encouraged to shape his own life.

Let's finally guarantee equal pay for women.

As for life, it is a battle and a sojourning in a strange land; but the fame that comes after is oblivion.

Change happens when people actively participate; lip service is what happens when people don't.

Voice your position in God and you will be surrounded by all the resources of God in the time of trial.