Actually, most things I say in public lead more or less directly to my own compositional practice, so I should be careful about generalizing lest they come back to haunt me.

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.

The truth was...he was in love with her. Totally over-the-line, no-going-back, not-even-dead-would-he-part kind of shit.

Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.

I wanted to create comics as soon as a I learned humans were behind them, that they were not natural phenomena like trees and boulders.

Yes, Consul. The next time one of our esteemed members turns into a worm and eats another esteemed member, we will inform you immediately.

When it thunders, the theefe becomes honest. [When it thunders, the thief becomes honest.]

Why is everyone telling me to do it? I already did it.

Attain deliverance in disturbances.

Without a belief in my programme and without an acceptance of my condition, you will ruin me, ruin yourselves and ruin the cause.

To take life was to understand your own death--that the Hour of the Huntsman also came for you.

You know, it's just politics, it's a game grown-ups like to play, like we lil' children play with toys.