I always talk about my ambition with music, and it's to sort of seduce people into listening to sounds they wouldn't normally listen to or want to hear.

You always come back to Duke Ellington - he's kind of like the thread that holds everything together from the big band descending to lots of jazz, actually.

The more you look into pigs the more you realize quite how everywhere they are. People come in contact with parts of pigs probably between 20 and 50 times a day. And that's before you even eat your dinner. And yet we just have a long string of negative words about them.

I think rhythm is, when you talk about rhythmic sensibility, quite perceptive in that I like to have at least one thing that is at least common or familiar to the audience.

Civilization rests on a set of promises; if the promises are broken too often, the civilization dies, no matter how rich it may be, or how mechanically clever. Hope and faith depend on the promises; if hope and faith go, everything goes.

Chaos is hateful. That indeterminate nature of war brings a really unsettling atmosphere to life.

People do things for love and belief and passion, not just because they're paid to do it.