This was possible only by dint of extended periods of frequently quite painful reflection and digestion.

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.

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

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.

What is heroic is not making life any harder that it has to be.

I enjoy living life and I enjoy going to different restaurants and eating my way through a country and going to different museums and learning about different cultures.

I'm funny. I'm a comedian. I'm not a clown.

Get yourself a notebook and write in it EVERY night for two weeks. Then stop if you can. If you can't, you're a writer.

I wasn't really quite sure where Heath Ledger came from, and I think that's the feeling most people got when they were around him and why he was so extraordinary.

Fasting is what prepares you for a new anointing.

America rests on shared values rather than shared ethnicity.

That's my punishment in hell, shoveling horseshit.

One major should not get you into the Hall of Fame - maybe one major and 40 wins. I'm not gonna pick a guy with one major and 11 wins.

When someone says to us, as Thich Nhat Hanh suggests, "Darling, I care about your suffering," a deep healing begins.