Quote

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.

Classical musicians do this all the time. They want perfection. So they piece things together. Eight bars of this and six bars of that. Glenn Gould said that with a recording he wanted to make perfect versions of pieces.

We were playing popular music, but we were doing our own arrangements because we were too lazy to sit down and figure out the originals.

I wrote a number of pieces in the year 1966 that were so bad that, although I'm a great collector of my own pieces, I have never collected them.

In the early days, I had very little idea about arrangements, and I wrote songs a little flat, as it were, just on an acoustic guitar. They didn't really have quite enough nuance.

I made one untitled piece.

When I think about how I want to reach an audience, I just wanted to make pieces that were inspired by something that gave me so much pleasure.

I think several generations of my family had novels in the drawer. You know the montage in 'The Royal Tenenbaums' where each character has produced some sort of minor work? It was like having a magician in the household.

The original lists were probably carved in stone and represented longer periods of time. They contained things like 'Get More Clay. Make Better Oven.'

I was very into making the Big Artistic Statement - it had to be innovative; it had to be cutting edge. I was desperately keen on being original.