In the range of music that we play - roughly 300 years' worth-there really are more similarities than differences.

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

Every orchestra I know, every opera house I know, is desperately looking around trying to find new talent, new composing talent, supporting young composers, supporting new ideas, supporting new ways of getting the message across.

Conducting was just something that happened by fluke.

I think truth as an idea should be left to the philosophers and perhaps religious leaders and politicians, and professional people who deal with that idea.

Sometimes you spend nine months, 10 months, a year writing a piece that you will hear two years later or something like that, and you never see anybody. It's a very different sort of metabolic.

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.