What I've noticed is that people who love what they do, regardless of what that might be, tend to live longer.

I'd say the differences are more interesting than the similarities at this point. Certainly no one would ever mistake my music for Steve's [ Reich].

I'd say it's just part of the world that we live in; it's part of the music world.

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.

It takes about a year to write an opera for me, but not a really a year of writing. I'm touring at the same time, and I'm playing, sometimes doing smaller projects.[The opera] Akhnaten fits in with Gandhi and Einstein, so that forms a trilogy in a way.I picked people who were these kind of larger than life characters, who kind of changed the world they lived in by almost the force of their personality and their inventiveness. People that I think not only do I admire but I think they're admirable people.

The hardest thing about traveling is that mostly you get to a point - and it always happens on every tour - where you can choose between eating and sleeping, but you can't do both.

So the real drama for me is balancing live performances and writing, and one of the ways I balance it is I write in hotel rooms. That's not exactly balancing. Actually, writing in hotel rooms means that I'm refusing to deal with the problem.