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

For me it's the instrument. If I want to think of a flute and the state of the arts I hear a vibrato; I don't know what a flute is unless the person plays it for me

What was great about the 50s is that for one brief moment - maybe, say, six weeks - nobody understood art.

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.

I was once married to a woman who could eat anything and tell you what was in it: the most complicated recipes. Her memory of taste - now that's what I call memory!

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

The most interesting aspect for me, composing exclusively with patterns, is that there is not one organizational procedure more advantageous than another, perhaps because no one pattern ever takes precedence over the others