The first year I started in San Francisco there was an American work on every program and there's been a lot of music by living composers and gradually that was part of the process of getting the audience really to trust me.

When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989 my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then.

I think the thing's that perhaps sad really is that younger people haven't come in and I think it must have been absolutely fantastic to have worked in the 50's when you had all of the great Broadway composers and when West Side Story didn't win the Tony Award.

I think Bach is equally a romantic composer because he laid the seeds harmonically for people like Chopin and the great Romantics Brahms so it's difficult to you know all this like labelling and putting - I think Bach is attractive to musicians because he supersedes the labels.

Since the composer has said everything if you discover everything it will be enough and you will be a happy man. Don't try to say it's your taste and because of that you are changing this or that. And I must say this respect is still there.

I shall always respect the composer. If I embellish it is his idea I am embellishing.

With Hitchcock I had little relationship. I was called to replace Bernard Herrmann his favorite composer in Torn Curtain after the bitter fight between them.

My husband is a composer so he plays piano all the time and I sit there and clap telling my unborn child 'Hear me clap hear the music.' I know music in general is supposed to be good for babies to hear.

I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself in a sense in the mid 1960s really when I first heard composers like Terry Riley and when I first started playing with tape recorders.

Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism.

If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.

It's hard to decide how to match words to music. It's not like it's twice the work. It's always difficult for me to explain to the composer what I'm looking for. I'm not a professional I lack even basic knowledge about writing music.

Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge for it requires from its disciples composers and performers alike not only talent and enthusiasm but also that knowledge and perception which are the result of protracted study and reflection.

My musical knowledge is so bad it's embarrassing. When composers discuss music with someone as primitive as myself they have to talk about it in terms of senses and emotion rather than keys and tempo.

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to one composer.

Asking the author of historical novels to teach you about history is like expecting the composer of a melody to provide answers about radio transmission.