When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989 my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then.

I started studying music at the age of five and a half. My older sister was taking piano lessons. When her teacher left our apartment I would get up on the piano bench and start picking out the notes that were part of my sister's lessons.

If you lock me in the room with a piano teacher for a year I might be able to knock out a rendition of 'Roll Out The Barrel ' but will I ever be a concert pianist? No.

I'm blessed with a good pair of ears. That's how I fooled my piano teacher. I'd watch his fingers and I'd listen to it and I just kind of basically learned it by myself.

I have never been so calculating as to sing some Barry White song to get a girl. But I do think it's very romantic to cook dinner and sit around the piano at night and sing together.

Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.

Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel read 2 000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.

My husband is a composer so he plays piano all the time and I sit there and clap telling my unborn child 'Hear me clap hear the music.' I know music in general is supposed to be good for babies to hear.