Similarly you can make a transition from one set of instruments to another imperceptibly.

There's another way of making music, by touching the lives and feelings of ordinary people.

The academic area of new music or modern music festivals is not something which attracts me at all.

Still, American composers working in France have had a pretty hard time.

I have friends who have a CD mastering plant in Hollywood and they are very sceptical about European record labels' understanding of digital technology.

I am writing something which I find satisfying and which I am prepared to put my name to as a composer.

Music history has flowed under the bridges for many years.

I remember once, when I started writing for the alto saxophone, a saxophonist told me to think of it as being like a cross between an oboe and a viola, but louder.

Writing tonal music now, you are not writing into the 19th Century.

It's rather like attending a university seminar where you are talking to a few gifted specialists who deliver a paper to an audience of their peers. That's one way of making music.

One thing I'm doing on the new Titanic recording is actually bringing in different acoustic spaces.

You are already that which you want to be, and your refusal to believe it is the only reason you do not see it.

To work all the time is to be incredibly lucky.

It is only in retrospect that the high points of our lives rise up, flaunting banners.

The Opera reminds me of my tax audit. It was in a language I didn’t understand. And it ended in tragedy.

He'll die first, we both know it, but I don't know... I really don't know how long I'll stay alive without him. That's the part Shaun doesn't know. I don't intend to be an only child for long.

Our love of what is beautiful does not lead to extravagance; our love of the things of the mind does not make us soft.

I believe that you understand a church only when you kneel in it.

Most of what you see in architecture are watered-down ideas of sculptors who have come before.

I will love myself as long as I never make a mistake.

I write in the mornings, in the bright daylight. But I get most of my good ideas after the sun has gone down and the dark is on the land.