Compositionally I always wanted to be like Fred Astaire.

I never understood what rules I was supposed to learn, and what rules I was supposed to break

At one point [Cardew] taught himself to play guitar simply in order to take part in the performance in a composition by Boulez, which is a little like saying he learned Danish to read Kiekegaard.

Boulez, who is everything I don't want art to be... Boulez, who once said in an essay that he is not interested in how a piece sounds, only how it is made.

Most music is metaphor, but Wolff is not. I am not metaphor either. Parable, maybe. Cage is sermon.

For years I said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart.

I have a very dear friend, a great painter, called me up very upset, the work wasn’t going well… He asked me to come to his studio -- which I did -- I looked around at the work, dozens of sketches, drawings, large pictures, and I was very close to his work, intensely involved with his work, and he asked me, ‘What’s wrong?’ And I said, ‘Simple – it’s a loss of nerve.