I don't think I'm capable of making radical changes, but over a period of four or five years you can perceive very big changes, and they seem rather small at the time.

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.

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

I was a regular kind of academic music student. I was at Juilliard. I had to study all the contemporary music of the time, and changing that language very radically was just a sign or a signal that I was going to try to do something very different. I find that that's what I feel closest to. I found no real inner response in me in a non-tonal language.

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.

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

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.