I'm glad I won it because when I grew up the Pulitzer was the award that every composer wanted and I was like that too.

I have tremendous respect for film composers.

Eighty percent of my pieces gravitate towards an A, as a tonal thing, not at the beginning, but somewhere in it.

Art is not only about angst.

Jazz is not the popular culture. Jazz is in the same position in our culture as classical music. A very small minority of people really love it.

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.