You get up early in the morning and you work all day. That’s the only secret.

I think it's a great handicap to be discovered at an early age. I didn't have that burden of early success. I had the much more livable and durable career where success comes late, and comes slowly, and you ease into it. So by the time it comes, you're ready to deal with it.

You get up early in the morning and you work all day. That’s the only secret.

What came to me as a revelation was the use of rhythm in developing an overall structure in music.

There's almost no content in terms of language at all. I don't like using language to convey meaning. I'd rather use images and music.

The generation of composers that are just preceded me, people like [Karlheinz] Stockhausen, [Pierre] Boulez, and, well, [John] Cage for that matter,[Morton] Feldman ... That was a kind of experimental music that was very isolated. It had no real public.

I like the idea that [Mahatma] Gandhi is appearing now in an opera hall in all these different places, and people kind of think about it again.