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

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

An audience shouldn't listen with complacency.

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.

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

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.

I Know not everyone will like me, but this is who I am So if you don't like it, Tough!

History is a pact between the dead the living and the yet unborn.

We were awfully poor. But we had a lot of things that money can't buy . . . like unpaid bills.

I'm a hopeless romantic. I love love. My middle name is Love. Valentine's Day is my favorite holiday. I want to have a family and children. I am a sucker for every romantic comedy that comes out.

It was his soul's freedom that was in question. And that question was whether freedom was worth the price when it meant shirking the responsibilities of honor.

I've been married for four years, and I'm still finding out things about my husband.

Remember this: you can have justice, or you can have two dollars. But you can t have both.

It is possible to avoid pain? Yes, but you'll never learn anything. Is it possible to know something without ever having experiencing it? Yes, but it will never truly be part of you.

Don't let your opinion sway your judgment.

I'm a black man in the United States of America, so I always feel like there's a target on me.