The Royal Festival Hall in London is nice; people hang out there. I think this inviting, non-exclusive character is very important.

The music I turn out these days is the kind of music I want to hear myself.

I discovered that the people of the North are different and there's no way you can make a person from the North similar to a Southerner. They're two different worlds.

The players never think they project enough. In a hall that seats 3,300 people, it's a very scary thing to play so quietly that you can barely hear yourself.

The Royal Festival Hall in London is nice; people hang out there. I think this inviting, non-exclusive character is very important.

Orchestras have become used to the emphasis on the separation of layers, of the ultimate precision and clarity.

I don't believe in an annual dose of film music for the sake of it being film music. If we program film music, it will be because there is a real artistic reason for doing so.

Once you get over the first hill, there is always a new, higher one lurking, of course.

Stravinsky is masterly: his harmony is conceived so precisely that it can only be the way it is.

The underlying process in Northern music tends to be slower and continuous, whatever's happening on the surface; in Southern music the underlying process is always faster.

I've learned a lot from the masters of orchestration, like Ravel and Stravinsky.

Every day we make more progress toward understanding the concert hall.

As we watch TV or films, there are no organic transitions, only edits. The idea of A becoming B, rather than A jumping to B, has become foreign.

The act of conducting in itself, of waving my arms in the air and being in charge, I didn't miss. I missed the sensual pleasure of being in contact with music.

There is such a suspicion in today's world of people who do more than one thing, who aren't specialized.

This continuity of sound and form was something that I became really interested in from working with Ligeti. He was always going on about how form has to be continuous.

Anyone who composes and conducts at the same time is immediately suspect, because he must be faking one or the other.

This conducting thing happened. In 1983 I was sucked into this international career, which was a very scary experience.

In Europe, there is so much tradition, and everyone has established ideas as to what art should be and what it has always been.

I love a visceral sound, the kind that hits you in the belly.

There will have to be times when I'm not conducting because I'm composing. I haven't solved that problem, and perhaps I never will.

With American orchestras, in particular, because they play in such huge halls, getting a true pianissimo is very hard.

My music wouldn't sound the way it does if I hadn't had the experience of conducting.

The sound was my greatest concern. There were certain difficulties getting used to the way every musician can hear his or herself, the way each of them relates to the musician in the next seat.

I can't imagine how many first performances I've done, perhaps 500. Some of them have been very good, and some of course very bad.

Los Angeles is just a more open place. The way L.A. functions is that people give you a forum. They say, Show us what you can do.

I'm still disturbed if a chord isn't together, but your priorities change as you get older.

After working with Ligeti I began to hear Brahms and Beethoven differently.

This country, and the West Coast, especially, is bad at preserving any cultural legacy.

If the seams are showing, there is something wrong with the performance or the construction of the piece. This idea is completely at odds with our modern visual experience, because everything today is based on montage.

Music has just as much to do with movement and body as it does soul and intellect.

In the range of music that we play - roughly 300 years' worth-there really are more similarities than differences.

Pulse as an active means of expression, Stravinsky and Beethoven are the two masters of that.

The Northern idea of form is more of a process. The various units of the form overlap. You can't tell where some things stop and new things start. This is typical of Sibelius.

I always had, deep down, a slight aversion toward the purely cerebral in music.

When we're at the end of The Rite of Spring or of a Bruckner symphony, I want people to feel the music physically.

I feel very free and very happy to be a composer.

There is more openness in LA to possibilities than on the East Coast of America. There is a pioneering spirit there that stems from the reason people went out there in the first place-to find something new.

In this watering-place I acted an heroic character, badly studied; and being a novice on such a stage, I forgot my part before a pair of lovely blue eyes.

I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.

But even with a character like Cary who is relatively outlandish, at the end of the movie he's in a place where I wouldn't have expected him to be - taking on the responsibility of a woman who is pregnant and who used to be his best friend's wife.

Always, your work is the same: You have to tell a story, you have to make a character. It doesn't matter if there are thousands of dollars, millions behind it, or if there is nothing.

Each of us is meant to have a character all our own, to be what no other can exactly be, and do what no other can exactly do.

I liked Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, and that is the kind of character that I would like to have played. That would have been more in tune with who I really was.

It's the difficulty we had with Mr. Bean, actually, when it went from TV to film. You certainly discover that you need to explain more about a character.

In a lot of ways, the make-up was the character.

The more we study the Indian's character the more we appreciate the marked distinction between the civilized being and the real savage.

So many people have said that to me, that what they really like about Alex is what she brings out in Marissa, and what this situation brings out in her, a hint of happiness and another side to her character.

I've been on the show for six years and I don't even know what her history is. I sort of make things up in my mind, but I think it's hard for an audience to follow and invest in a character when they don't have the details.