I always felt that one day I would have to make the change in my own life, bite the bullet and see what it is to be a composer who conducts rather than the other way around.

There is something very special about this part of the world [U.S], which is the openness and the curiosity and the lack of prejudice and the lack of generally accepted norms as to what art should be and how an artist's career should go and all that.

There will have to be times when I'm not conducting because I'm composing. I haven't solved that problem, and perhaps I never will.

I feel very free and very happy to be a composer.

I realized that the European dogma is not necessarily the only way to look at things.

Our industry [classic music] has kind of retarded into this kind of endless cover-producing thing, and it's a pity.

I went to work one morning, and outside my door was Cindy Crawford in a black bra, and I thought that very clearly the building is making progress in integrating itself into various layers of our culture.