Art is not only about angst.

What I think of as style - and I've gotten to this over years of really thinking about it - is that style is the unconscious choices I make.

The French Revolution is the ultimate modernist statement. Destroy everything. Don't build on the past. There is no past.

Art is not only about angst.

You become a great composer when you win a Pulitzer. But I think that now it's a completely meaningless award.

I have tremendous respect for film composers.

If you take a violin, you can make it sound 50 different ways. Not just pizzicato and played by the bow, but ponticello, and harmonics, and tremolos. If you take an oboe and play it, there's about one way you can make it sound: like an oboe.