My operas usually come from musical ideas rather than ideas about subject matter.

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.

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.

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

An older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.

When I was five years old, I auditioned for the role of 'Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol.'

There are no such things as applied sciences, only applications of science.

Find patience in the breath of life.

Good political leadership for me involves getting the big decisions right - however difficult, however controversial, however potentially divisive - and then being able to take people with you.

A lot of people are afraid to succeed and don't want to fail but if you don't attempt, aren't you already failing in the same spot?

I am scared of becoming a mother.

I love to fantasize still, as I did as a little boy. If I see a movie, I want to fantasize about what it's all about.

The solar system has no anxiety about its reputation.

To be a poet is to have an appetite for a certain anxiety which, when tasted among the swirling sum of things existent or forfeit, causes, as the taste dies, joy.