Any professional knows that the flute and the piano is a boring combination. All you've got to arrive at is a kind of typical gestural crap, right? You might agree, though you wouldn't call it gestural crap.

Compositionally I always wanted to be like Fred Astaire.

For me it's the instrument. If I want to think of a flute and the state of the arts I hear a vibrato; I don't know what a flute is unless the person plays it for me.

I never feel that my music is sparse or minimalist; the way fat people never really think they're fat. I certainly don't consider myself minimalist at all.

I want to give my compliments to Australia. Ever since your government paid a few million dollars for a Jackson Pollack painting, I figure that it must be a marvellous country.

I was once married to a woman who could eat anything and tell you what was in it: the most complicated recipes. Her memory of taste - now that's what I call memory!

I'm not suspicious, I'm just careful.

If you think you might have secret information listening to me, you're lost.

In a kind of middle-aged crisis, it dawned upon me that there was a possibility that music might not even be an art form.

Most people think what could I do, I think what shouldn't I do. What I should do perhaps is involved with the fact that I'm Jewish and what is known as Jewish paranoia. I don't feel comfortable enough to feel that everything is on my side and that it's going to work just the way I want it.

Music is essentially built upon primitive memory structures.

No one has the Houdini school of composition.

Since music has never had a Rembrandt, we have remained nothing more than musicians.

This business about being flung out of paradise is his gift to me. I'm glad I got out; it was getting too hot in there.