If You Don't Have A Basis On

If You Don't Have A Basis On Which To Make The Choice, Then You Don't Have A Style At All. You Have A Series Of Accidents.

The Hardest Thing About Traveling Is That Mostly You Get To A Point - And It Always Happens On Every Tour - Where You Can Choose Between Eating And Sleeping, But You Can't Do Both.

So The Real Drama For Me Is Balancing Live Performances And Writing, And One Of The Ways I Balance It Is I Write In Hotel Rooms. That's Not Exactly Balancing. Actually, Writing In Hotel Rooms Means That I'm Refusing To Deal With The Problem.

It Takes About A Year To Write An Opera For Me, But Not A Really A Year Of Writing. I'm Touring At The Same Time, And I'm Playing, Sometimes Doing Smaller Projects.[the Opera] Akhnaten Fits In With Gandhi And Einstein, So That Forms A Trilogy In A Way.i Picked People Who Were These Kind Of Larger Than Life Characters, Who Kind Of Changed The World They Lived In By Almost The Force Of Their Personality And Their Inventiveness. People That I Think Not Only Do I Admire But I Think They're Admirable People.

The Generation Of Composers That Are Just Preceded Me, People Like [karlheinz] Stockhausen, [pierre] Boulez, And, Well, [john] Cage For That Matter,[morton] Feldman ... That Was A Kind Of Experimental Music That Was Very Isolated. It Had No Real Public.