There are some people, by the way, that associate a certain amount of visualization with the performance of music. Those are people that really are not centrally concerned only with music, the traditional things.

I distrust anything that you don't hear.

Besides merely some pleasure that we get out of the combinations of pitches together and lines, I think that there is some satisfaction that we get in the fact of having this diffuse thing organized very concretely and put onto a frame and have it actually decided.

No, I think that a person writes a poem because they have an inner urge of something that they want to express, and I think it's that inner urge that you want to express when you write a piece of music.

Of all the arts, music is really the most abstract.

Now, there are sometimes making a connection between one section and another that sometimes you do want to see the pattern because it helps you to lead into the next thing - it's a rhetorical thing, where you just see how the pattern has to go into the next thing.

I'm really interested in writing a piece of music that will move you, that will really move you. That is really the only reason that I'm writing music.