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

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 don't watch a lot of television. Sports and news, that's it.

I like to run fast but not drive.

Anything is possible, but only a few things actually happen.

Rap is the only interesting music left - it's the only genre that's still pushing itself, and experimenting in a way that I find exciting.

With every record, with each band, I just try to make a song good. I'm not so much focusing on my technique. There are a million better drummers than me. I try to adapt to the songwriter; I try to adapt to the situation and retain my sort of melodic power. My goal is for the band to be good.

Stories, as we're taught in journalism school early on, are told through people. Those stories make our documentaries powerful. You can explore someone's culture, you can explore their experience, you can explore an issue through human beings who are going through it.

For a writer, personal freedom is not so important. It is not individual freedom that guarantees the greatness of literature; otherwise, writers in democratic countries would be superior to all others. Some of the greatest writers wrote under dictatorship - Shakespeare, Cervantes.

Be daring be different be impractical be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play it safers the creatures of the commonplace the slaves of the ordinary.

You hear a lot of scientists say the same thing. It doesn't have to be a big thing because the thing about being a scientist is even the little things are big things to us.

When youve exhausted all possibilities remember this you havent.

Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.

I don't want to own anything that won't fit into my coffin.

I am blessed.

Guns require a finger to pull the trigger.

The Republicans have kind of painted themselves into a kind of a real demographic corner, if you will.

A mutual and satisfied sexual act is of great benefit to the average woman, the magnetism of it is health giving. When it is not desired on the part of the woman and she gives no response, it should not take place.

Soon after I returned to private practice, former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger called me one day.

I've never worked as hard as when I was at drama school. It's the most professional environment I've ever been in.

Most people in this country believe that the American Communist Party and its dupes are the chief internal enemy of our economic system and our form of government. This is a serious mistake.

Conspiracies, since they cannot be engaged in without the fellowship of others, are for that reason most perilous; for as most men are either fools or knaves, we run excessive risk in making such folk our companions.

This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.

You've got to learn to survive a defeat. That's when you develop character.

I consider myself to be more real-sized than most of the actresses in California and in show business. They're very small. They're like miniature people.

I could not - and I still cannot - see a sustainable career as a filmmaker in which I focus fully on our gay stories.