Similarly you can make a transition from one set of instruments to another imperceptibly.

Craft is part of the creative process.

Over the years I have tried to develop something which is technically assured.

The project which we developed, however, was for a sound piece and I was initially curious that a sculptor should be interested in working with a musician, especially on a project for radio.

It makes sense to invest in new work. It's almost like having a research department in a scientific laboratory. You have to try things out. You'll make some bad mistakes. Some things will fail but at least you'll energise the organisation.

I remember once, when I started writing for the alto saxophone, a saxophonist told me to think of it as being like a cross between an oboe and a viola, but louder.

As I had collaborated with visual artists before whether on installations, on performance pieces, in the context of theatre works and as I had taught for a time in art colleges the idea of writing music in response to painting was not alien.

Music history has flowed under the bridges for many years.

I know that John Adams has had a very hard time directing French ensembles.

It's rather like attending a university seminar where you are talking to a few gifted specialists who deliver a paper to an audience of their peers. That's one way of making music.

I have friends who have a CD mastering plant in Hollywood and they are very sceptical about European record labels' understanding of digital technology.

Somehow in the 20th Century an idea has developed that music is an activity or skill which is not comprehensible to the man in the street. This is an arrogant assertion and not necessarily a true one.

There's another way of making music, by touching the lives and feelings of ordinary people.

Still, American composers working in France have had a pretty hard time.

The academic area of new music or modern music festivals is not something which attracts me at all.

I am writing something which I find satisfying and which I am prepared to put my name to as a composer.

Similarly you can make a transition from one set of instruments to another imperceptibly.

I currently spend a lot of time thinking about orchestration and every detail of a piece.

People like Arvo Part would not have been taken seriously 20 years ago.

Like an apparently strict musical form it breaks the five minute whole into its structural parts - a descriptive preamble, the action of taking the cards, the development of the cards' manipulation and the revelation of what has been achieved.

When Philip Glass asked me if I would be interested in doing a new recording of Jesus' Blood he assumed that I would do something similar to the first version and wanted to know what other pieces would be on the same CD.

One thing I'm doing on the new Titanic recording is actually bringing in different acoustic spaces.

What was once underground is now coming to the surface.

Writing tonal music now, you are not writing into the 19th Century.

I work very fast, keeping the ideas flowing but making sure they come out the way I intended.

I've heard though that there is a younger generation of tonal French composers who are reacting with vigour.

I don't do formal debates, because formal debates where you have two people up on a stage in equal status, and each of them is given 20 minutes to give their point of view, and then 10 minutes for a rebuttal, or whatever, that creates the illusion that you really do have here two equal points of view of equal scientific standing.

As a producer, I try to bring as many nice people as I can to insure that there's no screaming, there's no shouting, there's no bullying. The more of those kind of people that you can bring together, the better the experience everyone has on set.

I think it's well-known that I love all things ABC and Shonda Rhimes - I'm a huge 'Scandal' and 'Grey's Anatomy' fan.

Everybody goes through a stage where you have it. And, all of a sudden, you don't have it anymore. You get older and the audience gets younger.

Hockey would be a great game if played in the mud.

Comedy is a comfortable yet challenging place for me. I will always feel an inner pressure to do my best and to improve.

I feel like I think like a woman because I grew up with my mother and my sister, so I've just been programmed to think like a girl.

I think people like musicals. And when done with a modern comedic sensibility, musical comedy can be the most efficient delivery of both storytelling and jokes.

Happiness is an attitude. We either make ourselves miserable, or happy and strong. The amount of work is the same.

Sometimes music, movies and books are the only things that let us feel like someone else feels like we do.

Perhaps anti-depressants should be best reserved for the very extreme cases and, more importantly, for those who do not respond to alternative forms of interventions.

You know, I'm not making top dollar, but when you're making top dollar, there are a lot of people waiting for you to fall.

The decisions you make are a choice of values that reflect your life in every way.

I'm very proud of New Order and Joy Division, that heritage of songs.

The stereotypical successful entrepreneur is Mark Zuckerberg - the young college dropout who dreamed up a crazy idea while in his dorm room.

From the beginning of our history the country has been afflicted with compromise. It is by compromise that human rights have been abandoned.

Definitely River Phoenix is somebody that I thought, 'This guy is very cool.' I wanted to be like him when I was a kid.

People don't realize that the Obama Administration has been, if anything, harder on whistleblowers than the Bush Administration. Part of the reason is that they know that the response will be more muted because the traditional constituency supporting whistleblowers just happen to be the same constituency as Obama's.

Israeli governments cling to the two-state notion because it seems to reflect the sentiments of the Jewish Israeli majority, and it shields the country from international opprobrium even as it camouflages relentless efforts to expand Israel's territory into the West Bank.

You can make your own way. It's about getting out there and not letting rejection get you down.

I say things other people wish they could say. I don't pick on people - I empower them.

We donate a lot of food to rescue organizations.

Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Russian, combined.