In studying music, you're dealing with a person, not just what comes to you on a piece of paper, and it's important to get hold of what it is that lies between that person as a person, and the things which they're producing on the paper. I don't know whether I see things in too complex a fashion, but often people will do things which are not actually their nature, but will do things because they think that's what they should do.

The one thing I never did, I was never strict in my techniques. I might have pretended in the past at times that I did work serially, or something like that, but I never did, it was always I let my ear tell me what to do.

Anything that we love seems to always come out in some form or another, but once it gets into your brain, these things get processed, and they come out in new shapes and forms.

I was always self-taught, there was no-one to study with when I was doing composition.

There's only just so much you can do; I prefer to do only a couple of things and go to some depth in them.

I had great difficulties learning to play initially because I could not think rhythmically properly, although it's an even-paced rhythm, I was not phrasing properly, I was too Western. It took me a while to learn to think in needed form, and the only way I could learn was just by ear.

I use music as something from which I obtain some form of - I hate to use the word spiritual - guidance, an awareness of something more than the day-to-day or the petty. I am not reading Emanuel Kant to try to embark on a task of seeing if I can understand myself, what the aesthetic experience is. But I wholeheartedly believe in it, even though I think not too many do nowadays.