I'm trying to phase out my availability on the phone. People call you when you're walking down the street and say the most random stuff.

In really fancy restaurants they never point to the bathroom, they just gesture toward the bathroom or they'll lead you to the bathroom. The fancier the restaurant, the less pointing there is.

I didn't entertain the idea that my music would ever become available in any of the ways that I had previously known music to be available.

For me the best kind of film music is liturgical music. Liturgical music is essentially a million scores for the same film.

There's a lot of violence in Beethoven not explicitly suggested by the notes or in his markings, necessarily. There's just a way that it looks on the page that encourages it to be played in a certain fashion.

Writing orchestra music, you need for the emotional content to come from everyone doing everything together, adding up as it goes, a crowd mentality.

The score is doing a lot of work. It's like Wagner. It's like a yak carrying people.