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.

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.

The work I've done is the work I know, and the work I do is the work I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing.

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.

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.

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.

I always knew what I wanted to do and I did it.