Akhnaten is kind of a dark, kind of mysterious character. We don't know a lot about him - a lot of information on him was lost. But he obviously was a kind of iconoclast of him time. I guess I'm attracted to people like that. Like [Albert] Einstein also, who radically changed our way of thinking about the world we live in.

In order to arrive at a personal style, you have to have a technique to begin with.

I travel the world, and I'm happy to say that America is still the great melting pot - maybe a chunky stew rather than a melting pot at this point, but you know what I mean.

If you remember your lineage, you will never feel lonely.

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

Satyagraha is an opera which I wrote for the Netherlands Opera, so it uses an orchestra of around fifty, a chorus of forty, and there are about seven soloists. The opera ... Satyagraha means truthful, so it was a name [Mahatma] Gandhi used to describe his civil disobedience movement.

Traditions are imploding and exploding everywhere - everything is coming together, for better or worse, and we can no longer pretend were all living in different worlds because were on different continents.