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.

So the better my partner or my opposition, however you like to think about it, the better my game.

God's been very good to me. I'm truly blessed.

It is unlucky to have thirteen at a table or in a company. The number 13 in the Christian faith is the number of people at the Last Supper with the 13th guest at the table being the traitor Judas.

It's been a pattern in my life - when I get in trouble, I try to get out of it, since I was little.

I think I'm a mama's boy who wanted to be a hockey player, who failed, and had to become a singer. I think that I'm a generous, impatient, kind, jerk.

There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.

I would love to design my own shoe line. Women suffer too much in heels. I want to design a line of sexy platform heels that don't hurt.

Those who knew Lincoln described him as an extraordinarily funny man. Humor was an essential aspect of his temperament. He laughed, he explained, so he did not weep.

A bond as important as that of a husband and wife, is the bond between siblings.

Time is money. Wasted time means wasted money means trouble.

I realized that I had traveled to Havana during what now seems like the childhood of the Cuban Revolution, if you think that Fidel has now been in power for 44 extremely long years. I started looking at the revolution as history, and not as part of the daily news.

Fur is my default, my indulgence. All human beings and myself have a lot of defaults. Many indulgences.

From doing Power Station, it was like, it's the same guys, but it doesn't sound like them. When we were in Duran, the labels and management wanted more Duran stuff so they could sell it.

I didn't grow up thinking, 'Oh, maybe someday I'm going to have a shoe named after me.'

I don't connect much with the present. I have more of an affinity for what came in the past.

New fathers, political prisoners, traumatised presidential aides, resolute schoolboys, MEPs addressing unfriendly chambers - we all find that Shakespeare has magically anticipated our precise circumstances. How he was possible, I still don't understand; but there isn't a day I'm not grateful that he speaks to me in my own language.

No man goes before his time unless the boss leaves early.

We used to get one room and we'd park the vehicle outside, everybody would all take showers and we'd steal towels because we knew we wasn't gonna have enough towels for all five of us to shower.

Eventually, I think you find a spiritual and emotional connection with someone, and I think it unifies you with everyone else. I think if you love one person, it makes you love everyone. That's how I feel now.

I'd always avoided stuff like 'Where are they now?' or 'Whatever happened to?' Just 'No thanks, thanks for calling.' You tell me, have you ever seen a 'Whatever happened to' where they seemed anything but pathetic?

Zen is not a religion. There is no room for a cult. There is no dependence on a teacher. There is only learning how to use your own mind and making it strong.

I am strong-willed, which can be annoying sometimes. And from that I think people assume I have confidence and Hollywood glamour and all that stuff, when actually, in my personal life, sometimes I'm just a goofball.

I do a lot of video games - I have a YouTube channel where I record me playing video games with my friends and post it. That's a hobby I have and a lot of what I do in my off time.

I want my weekends off and I want to put my kids to bed. Those are good reasons to want to be in 'Batman 2'.