I'm still disturbed if a chord isn't together, but your priorities change as you get older.

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

My music wouldn't sound the way it does if I hadn't had the experience of conducting.

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.

I love a visceral sound, the kind that hits you in the belly.

As we watch TV or films, there are no organic transitions, only edits. The idea of A becoming B, rather than A jumping to B, has become foreign.

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.