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

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.

One realizes the immortality of true love only after the lover dies

For every setback, do not get discouraged. Rejoice because you learned more than you expected.

With what price we pay for the glory of motherhood.

But I finally concluded that it is an inalienable right of lovers everywhere to become temporarily worthless to the world, it may even be their duty.

As machines become more and more efficient and perfect, so it will become clear that imperfection is the greatness of man.

I didn't much like being in Parliament physically. I found it a bit depressing. It's very dark and heavy. I like being out and about.

Children not only have to learn what their parents learned in school, but also have to learn how to learn. This has to be recognized as a new problem which is only partly solved.

I run around in circles, professionally.

No movie can be a downer that fills you with pure exhilaration. You leave WALL-E with a feeling of the rarest kind: that you've just enjoyed a close encounter with an enduring classic.

Everyone's so timid and afraid to insult anybody, but in the end, it's like we're all trying to please everyone. In the end, we please no one.