Some kids, for some reason, it just doesn't click in the classroom as they need it to. We have college coaches talk to them, former high school athletes, motivational speakers, teachers, principals.

Any working composer or painter or sculptor will tell you that inspiration comes at the eighth hour of labour, rather than as a bolt out of the blue. We have to get our vanities and our preconceptions out of the way and do the work in the time allotted.

There's a very basic human, non-verbal aspect to our need to make music and use it as part of our human expression. It doesn't have to do with body movements, it doesn't have to do with articulation of a language, but with something spiritual.

Middle age, my boy. No memory at all.

I find that musically, looking back, I have learned much more from those relationships, people I have bumped into that I have admired, that's the way I feel musically I have learned most in life.

I'm not a frustrated concert composer, and the concert pieces I've done have been a small part of my work. What I've sought there is instruction, variation from the demands of film and relief from its restrictions.

A chap can't pick the way he'll die, or we'd all do better at it.