Minimalism now is a reaction to what came before. It's absolutely of its time. Music moved into the set theory thing, and moved out of it.

I think music has gone through a period of something very severe, rather radical, rather the way painting did with cubism.

I didn't have a record player.

I don't have ideas so much as there are things which constantly evolve... there are various threads or layers, if you like, which change.

When I was confronted with official tuition, the academic thing, I could see no relationship whatever between that and the music I'd been writing since I was 11.

The opera tells the story with all the built-in contradictions and from many different angles.

The theatre only knows what it's doing next week, not like the opera, where they say: 'What are we going to do in five years' time?' A completely different attitude.

Music is such a problem in the time it takes.

People say my music is English. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's not me writing English music, but that English music is becoming more like me.

The thing about influence is that any composer worth anything will give you the same names.

My operas and my theatre works are very formal pieces.

I foresee no possibility of venturing into themes showing a closer view of reality for a long time to come. The public itself will not have it. What it wants is a gun and a girl.

Love's the little leaven that works the whole world glad.

We feel like there are way too many problems in the world, and there's nothing we can do to solve them. We forget how to be compassionate and start to feel hopeless.

I was extremely aggressive from the start.

The most constructive way of resolving conflicts is to avoid them.

There is nothing better than humor to keep a marriage going.

There are questions which illuminate, and there are those that destroy. I was always taught to ask the first kind.

I make a hundred mistakes a day. I am, and have been, and will continue to be, wrong about almost everything.

Love, it turns out, is as undemocratic as money, so it accumulates around people who have plenty of it already: the sane, the healthy, the lovable.

All the cliches of glamorous sophistication have little appeal to me. Do I want to live the British version of 'Dynasty?' No thanks!