The past nine years in San Diego have represented such a period of questioning.

Naturally enough, I couldn't have foreseen the vast sea change which has come upon that scene as a result of German reunification and associated events.

In any case, the fewer boundaries that exist hindering free movement between all forms of articulate human cognition, the better.

The idea of 'machine assemblage' is, especially, very alien to my sensibility, since it suggests a relative indifference of the strata to one another during the process of construction.

What makes a specific quality or quantity of innovation retain its intense newness over the years?

The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics.

In my model, important interference phenomena arise when individual strata come into contact. These chaotic fluctuations are, I suppose, what my music is really about.

It is still true that it is easier to compose a poem in the form of a manual for adjusting a VCR than it is to write a piece using just tuning as a symphony.

There would seem to be a limit, even for an art preoccupied with boundaries and transgressions, beyond which a work reaches its breaking point and becomes an actual failure, a mere experimentation.

Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.

I suppose that the scope and implications of such forces have rendered my personal accounting ritual pretty much obsolete. That's how things sometimes go.

Whatever crimes this man had committed, they weren't as egregious as his inflated self-image.

Living in a place like this, she must have learned how to see all the monsters that can hide a person.

In the EU you have half a billion people who share a common belief in democracy, in rights, in the kind of economic life we want.

Music was my whole life, not a career. It definitely was never easy... Still isn't.

Planning stuff out sucks. If you plan stuff out, you wind up talking in a very monotonous, unnatural way.

Satori is a brief flash. Suddenly the light breaks through. For a short timeless time we experience eternity in its unmanifest form. It's comparable to salvikalpa samadhi.

I regretted making a comment about Dave Eggers. I’ve never said anything about McSweeneys except that I admire what it is, and I think it’s great that they keep people interested in literature.

We can't control whether we are rewarded for our endeavours, with cash or recognition. It is not up to us how much cash or time we get on Earth, but it is down to us how we spend it.

Yeah, tell me I'm a bottle of single malt scotch, she thought. That's the way to my heart.

I always feel that the best roles are written for white guys.