If you aim at anything lower that is expecting your audience to be really alert and aware, then you're going to be caught out sooner or later as a composer.

The present government is very insistent that business sponsorship should replace government sponsorship of the arts. Business sponsorship won't happen unless you make tax concessions, which they won't.

At the moment, in Britain we're facing such enormous cutbacks in education programs and music programs and art programs that you feel you are knocking your head against a brick wall.

An audience shouldn't listen with complacency.

If you don't get feedback from your performers and your audience, you're going to be working in a vacuum.

I know what I want at least, and the older I get I think I'm better at getting it out of players and singers.

I recently did a piece for the Boston Pops and John Williams, and I hope that it's as well a composed piece as I've ever done for any other medium or occasion.

If you're writing a piece for the Boston Pops, the balance is towards one end. If you're writing a piece for a chamber music society, then it's towards another point. I won't make a final answer on that. I think it changes with every piece.

The establishment in Britain is certainly against the arts and against education. If something doesn't make a profit, it's invalid, and art doesn't make a profit in that sense.

The demands are related to their questing of the best possible out of the people concerned. It's this going for the highest possible factor that I'm very concerned about.

I'm obviously very keen on the theater and I think it's inevitable that some of the orchestral and chamber pieces have got dramatic elements which might even suggest an unspecified dramatic plot of some kind or other, even though it's not in my mind at the time.

I don't see how they can with most of my pieces, but I think it's unfortunate that they can through familiarity with flashy performances of a great deal of other music.

I'm not actually teaching any more, but I am writing pieces for schools all the time, and for kids.

But you can't really know your audiences so well.

I'm very interested, for instance, in music in education - getting young people not only to listen to, but participate in the music that I write. I consider this one of the most vital aspects of my work.

What they can expect always is that they're going to be made to think.

But when you get a bit older, and I hate to use the word, quite a bit more established, people take more notice and conducting becomes a great deal easier. You don't have battles like you had before.

If you aim at anything lower that is expecting your audience to be really alert and aware, then you're going to be caught out sooner or later as a composer.

Recently I've been participating in radio and television talk programs doing broadcasts and conferences, and shooting my mouth off and really going to town.

You don't underestimate either players or audience in any circumstances.

You can't pander to your audience. You might in the short term, but ultimately you can't hoodwink them, either.

If you dont get feedback from your performers and your audience youre going to be working in a vacuum.

I wanted a name I could shape the music towards. I was going to Miami quite a lot at the time, speaking a lot of Spanish with my friends from Cuba - 'Lana Del Rey' reminded us of the glamour of the seaside. It sounded gorgeous coming off the tip of the tongue.

Washington, D.C. is what is broken, not the immigration policies. We have good laws. We have people suffer every day because of government's failure to enforce the law and be respectful to the process we have. We have a pathway to citizenship already in place.

So that Sunday morning I ended up going to church and thats when I got saved.

It's such a luxury to be able to be happy about going to work in the morning.

I'm hoping that with the high profile that the Go-Go's are going to have over the next year, that if anybody is interested in what else I do, I'll have something I can say that I do.

Experience finds few of the scenes that lively hope designs

I have a huge respect for writers and realise that this is not an area that I find easy. I doubt that I would have the patience in front of a blank sheet of paper to become a writer.

The smell of pine needles, spruce and the smell of a Christmas tree - those to me, are the scents of the holidays.

There comes a point in your life when you realize your parents aren't perfect.

The consequences of decisions don't just affect spreadsheets... They affect, in fundamental ways, the lives of people and they often mean the difference between life and death.

Never fight with or disrespect your partner in front of other people.

Altruism is a fine motive, but if you want results, greed works much better.

I don't think that any government has a right to subvert the truth or to cover up the truth, and all I see WikiLeaks doing is exposing the truth.

I went to Texas a few times for gigs and adopted the cowboy look. Every man, at some point in his life, goes through a cowboy stage - everyone! Well, at least everyone that I look up to!

For 'Narrow Stairs', the majority of the songs I brought in were guitar songs - songs we could sit in a room and just play. I can honestly say I had more fun and felt more inspired on this record than anything that we had done in a long time.

I'd like to see much more understanding of emotional issues around hurt, abandonment, disappointment, longing, failure and shame, where they stem from and how they drive people and policies brought into public discourse.

Wall Street is in trouble because Main Street is broke.

So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.

The Cold War began with the division of Europe. It can only end when Europe is whole.

Interest in certain themes doesn't mandate a personal stake or personal experience of those themes. I've killed people in plays, but no one asks me what it's like to kill people.

There is an immutable conflict at work in life and in business, a constant battle between peace and chaos. Neither can be mastered, but both can be influenced. How you go about that is the key to success.

We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in & be what people are interested in.

When we talk about the things at Airbnb that are challenging and that they are going to have to overcome, the parallels with eBay are across the board. It's community management. It's making sure the marketplace is in balance - the right amount of buyers and sellers.

It was a shock to people of the nineteenth century when they discovered, from observations science had made, that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection.