Our experience is composed rather of illusions that of wisdom acquired.

When written in Chinese the word 'crisis' is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.

The first year I started in San Francisco there was an American work on every program and there's been a lot of music by living composers and gradually that was part of the process of getting the audience really to trust me.

With the help of modern technology I can compose intricate keyboard parts and then I have to go back and learn them in order to perform them properly.

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.

Our strength is often composed of the weakness that we're damned if we're going to show.

Society is composed of two great classes those who have more dinners than appetite and those who have more appetite than dinners.

I think the thing's that perhaps sad really is that younger people haven't come in and I think it must have been absolutely fantastic to have worked in the 50's when you had all of the great Broadway composers and when West Side Story didn't win the Tony Award.

I think Bach is equally a romantic composer because he laid the seeds harmonically for people like Chopin and the great Romantics Brahms so it's difficult to you know all this like labelling and putting - I think Bach is attractive to musicians because he supersedes the labels.

Since the composer has said everything if you discover everything it will be enough and you will be a happy man. Don't try to say it's your taste and because of that you are changing this or that. And I must say this respect is still there.