I'm not a music lover in the sense that I look for something to have on. I've never had that attitude to music.

I think music has gone through a period of something very severe, rather radical, rather the way painting did with cubism.

I didn't have a record player.

I don't have ideas so much as there are things which constantly evolve... there are various threads or layers, if you like, which change.

When I was confronted with official tuition, the academic thing, I could see no relationship whatever between that and the music I'd been writing since I was 11.

The opera tells the story with all the built-in contradictions and from many different angles.

The theatre only knows what it's doing next week, not like the opera, where they say: 'What are we going to do in five years' time?' A completely different attitude.

Music is such a problem in the time it takes.

People say my music is English. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's not me writing English music, but that English music is becoming more like me.

Minimalism now is a reaction to what came before. It's absolutely of its time. Music moved into the set theory thing, and moved out of it.

The thing about influence is that any composer worth anything will give you the same names.

Often, the human animal dresses terror in rage, and expresses both in a way unlike either.

The mind doesn’t harass you

The last thing Scripture should do is make you blind in the world. Instead, you hear everything, see everything, and feel everything because everything just so happens to point right back to it.

I have a very childlike rage, and a very childlike loneliness.

I love learning, and I think that curiosity is a wonderful gift.

If somebody stamps on your head in that way, you wouldn't say, 'Thank you very much, can I turn the other cheek'. Only Jesus Christ did that.

I've got personal views on the '60s. You can't have freedom without paying the price for it.

If God spent 180 million years making dinosaurs, what makes us think Man is so special, a tick of the clock before midnight?

When you make a choice as a writer about what it is you want to write, and what it is you're going to spend six months thinking about, you have to fall in love.

Stress is a message. It is a personal invitation to make a change for the better.