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I think I compose as a listener: improvising and listening back excites me because I get to ideas that never would have occurred. Then I bring in the computers and samplers... and I begin to loop and process and change them.

Composing is like driving down a foggy road toward a house. Slowly you see more details of the house-the color of the slates and bricks, the shape of the windows. The notes are the bricks and the mortar of the house.

When I am composing, I try to clear my mind of having to publish, or having to sell a book or find readers. That kind of thinking gets in the way.

The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.

Writing is a way of drifting within my own mind: almost a solitary process, so to speak.

I run around so much that I finally reasoned that composing is the one musical endeavour which you can do anywhere, anytime.

To me, writing and composing are much more like painting, about colors and brushes; I don't use a computer when I write, and I don't use a piano. I'm at a desk writing, and it's very broad strokes and notes as colors on a palette.

I am composing like a god, as if it simply had to be done as it has been done.