People like Arvo Part would not have been taken seriously 20 years ago.

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.

We do not observe reality, we observe our REACTIONS to it.In other words:Reality is, in essence, neutral. YOU give it meaning.

There's one advantage to being 102. There's no peer pressure.

What you really remember at the beginning was that you have to throw a budget together. We made some terrible mistakes at the beginning in my own budget that took us at least a year to catch up on.

There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough.

You have been overcome; and whether you are overcome by envy or by a so-called noble influence, you are still a slave, you are not free.

It's hard to give a career like this up, when I tell my wife I'm going to the office, and it's the beach.

Sometimes we praise the way things used to be in order to blame the present, and we esteem what is no longer in order to scorn what is.

It was very natural for me to want to disappear into the theatre, I am really very shy.

Definition is the death of discovery.

The first time onstage, a light went on. 'OK, this is my thing. I'm comfortable here. This is my thing.'