You can't pander to your audience. You might in the short term, but ultimately you can't hoodwink them, either.

You don't underestimate either players or audience in any circumstances.

An audience shouldn't listen with complacency.

If you don't get feedback from your performers and your audience, you're going to be working in a vacuum.

The establishment in Britain is certainly against the arts and against education. If something doesn't make a profit, it's invalid, and art doesn't make a profit in that sense.

If you aim at anything lower that is expecting your audience to be really alert and aware, then you're going to be caught out sooner or later as a composer.

At the moment, in Britain we're facing such enormous cutbacks in education programs and music programs and art programs that you feel you are knocking your head against a brick wall.

Recently I've been participating in radio and television talk programs doing broadcasts and conferences, and shooting my mouth off and really going to town.

I recently did a piece for the Boston Pops and John Williams, and I hope that it's as well a composed piece as I've ever done for any other medium or occasion.

I know what I want at least, and the older I get I think I'm better at getting it out of players and singers.

I'm not actually teaching any more, but I am writing pieces for schools all the time, and for kids.

Protesters are still on the fringes like satellites, revolving around the system. But prophets and poets lead us into a new world, beyond simply yelling at the old one.

Religions differ only in the form

When we look at something, we are often not aware of who is perceiving, and unaware of the mental-emotional filter created by past experiences, hopes and expectations.

The man who didn't want his wife to work has been succeeded by the man who asks about her chances of getting a raise.

Everybody's always looking for the person they're better than

We use the web to help people organize in the flesh, and then we take the images of those events and put them back on the web to make them add up to more than the sum of their parts.

I'd love to do a show in Vegas with drag queens. The tackier the better.

Why should it happen that among the great many women whom I see and am fond of, suddenly somebody I meet for half an hour opens the door into poetry?

I have not got accustomed to English life. The food is truly disastrous and it rains all the time.

Dad was supportive, intelligent, read to me as a kid, left me a trillion dollars. It's hard to complain.