Music is a performance and needs the audience.

My true function within a society which embraces all of us is to continue an age-old tradition. This tradition is to create images from the depths of the imagination and to give them form, whether visual, intellectual or musical.

Beethoven suppressed everything, his personal life disappeared until he was locked inside. That is a figure quite extreme.

The blues are like the fugue in 18th century. It's probably the music that belongs most to our time.

I remain a humanist. We are a very curious race.

Public notice does not necessarily accord with internal fulfilment.

I'm outside the music I've made. I have no interest in it.