The academic area of new music or modern music festivals is not something which attracts me at all.

There's another way of making music, by touching the lives and feelings of ordinary people.

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

Bring your reality to life by mining the intuitive abilities of your heart.

Talk without the support of action means nothing.

Lightning can best be seen in the dark...Bright persons do best in bad circumstances

This will be a good time for poetry, you know, when things get darker and stranger and your very speech is being questioned and the sense of trusting that human thing.

For the first time since 1979, we are talking to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Obama says talking to him is probably pointless, but it's a hell of a relief from Mitch McConnell.

'Tis never for their wisdom that one loves the wisest, or for their wit that one loves the wittiest; 'tis for benevolence, and virtue, and honest fondness, one loves people...

We all make mistakes. It's human. Just learn from them. Repeating them and being aware of it is the dangerous bit.

Everything that happened to me happened by mistake. I don't believe in fate. It's luck, timing and accident.

Your birth was no mistake or mishap, and your life is no fluke of nature. Your parents may not have planned you, but God did. He was not at all surprised by your birth. In fact, he expected it.

Even championship-winning teams don't play well all the time.