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'm interested in what happens to music when other people use it. Whereas there are composers who don't like anyone to touch their music, I think people should because they do things I can't think of.

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.

A new language requires a new technique. If what you're saying doesn't require a new language, then what you're saying probably isn't new.

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

I think I'm really part of a whole generational movement in a way. I think a lot of other people since and during this time have gotten interested in writing what we can still call experimental music. It's not commercial music. And it's really a concert music, but a concert music for our time. And wanting to find the audience, because we've discovered the audience is really there. Those became really clear with Einstein on the Beach.

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