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.

Have you heard of this new thing called the internet? It's giving people new expectations. It's allowing them to become their own expert. Knowledge lies anxious at their fingertips. Gloss over the truth in your advertising and you'll quickly be dismissed as a poser.

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.

You'll know if you're a famous composer if 20 years from now your name appears on a pull-down menu in Band in a Box alongside Hans Zimmer.

We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces which represent 30% of our musical experience.

I think there's a time as a writer when you want to see the best things in life and you go out wherever you go with your dreams as a writer or a composer.

Every song has a composer every book has an author every car has a maker every painting has a painter and every building has a builder. So it isn't irrational to take this simple logic a little further and say that nature must have had a Maker. It would be irrational to believe that it made itself.

Remember always that the composer's pen is still mightier than the bow of the violinist in you lie all the possibilities of the creation of beauty.

I am but an architectural composer.

It's amazing how fast generations lose sight of other generations. One of the first things the young composers who come to work with me say is that they want to write music people will like instead of gaining their credentials by being rejected by the audience.