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I think a composer is always interested in his last work.

I've always been a composer dependent on texts.

In my next lifetime, I want to come back as a composer.

Music is a continuum and the modern and avant-garde composers of today will be part of the standard repertoire 30 years from now.

I think that my past stands me in good stead in that it does have a certain strength for musicians.

The moment artists can just do what they love to do then music will go right back to where it used to be. I mean back in the '60s and '70s and '80s, that's what it was.

I'm a composer, man.

So many of the sounds that contemporary composers were trying to create were to be found in the traditional musics of the world. That was encouraging but also little daunting to think that you had to work so hard to be new and yet it was old.

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.