After 30 years I have realized the greatest pleasure I can get is to have learnt.

I think we still do have a PR problem in the sense that these institutions portray themselves quite often as a museum without the contemporary wing. For a young cutting-edge person, why would you get into that sort of business, which is very clearly geared towards dead or almost dead people?

I actually don't like this term, "classic." It's wrong, but we don't have a better word at the moment.

With American orchestras, in particular, because they play in such huge halls, getting a true pianissimo is very hard.

I always had, deep down, a slight aversion toward the purely cerebral in music.

If we always thought like that, why would we study physics, why would we think of cosmology, why would we do any kind of research? Because we know already so much that there is no one person who can contain all that information.

I'm trying to conduct only five months a year, and the rest will be composing time. I'm trying to spend as much as I can out of those months here in L.A., because for creative work, this is a fantastic place.