You practice and you get better. It's very simple.

I don't know what I'm doing and it's the not knowing that makes it interesting.

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

Finally, ultimately, you write music for yourself. I mean, I need a public, I need people to play, I need everything else. I'm not working in isolation. But finally the man that writes the music is alone. And I have to respond to those criteria which are almost like inner needs or inner responses.

Theatrical times are different from concert times, to put it simply. Taking a figure like [Mahatma] Gandhi and setting him on a stage requires thinking about what theater is about and what the whole experience is about and what we're trying to communicate in that way, so you get into certain less abstract considerations.

It doesn't need to be imagined, it needs to be written down.

I, as a young guy getting out of music school, I didn't like the prospect of spending my life writing music for about 200 people.