London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books.

I am in the Pitte, but I have gone so deep that I can see the brightness of the Starres at Noon.

To watch King Lear is to approach the recognition that there is indeed no meaning in life, and that there are limits to human understanding.

There are so many characters whizzing around inside my head, it's like Looney Tunes. But as soon as I've finished writing about them, I completely forget who they are.

London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books.

I have always believed that the material world is governed by nonmaterial sources, so that in that sense 'English Music' is an exercise in the spiritual as well as the material. I have always been attracted to the Gothic and spiritual imagination, and I've always been interested in visionaries.

The embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is as if the little bird which flew through the Anglo-Saxon banqueting hall, in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, gained the outer air and became the lark ascending in Vaughan Williams's orchestral setting. The unbroken chain is that of English music itself.