People say my music is English. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's not me writing English music, but that English music is becoming more like me..

I'm not an architectural composer..

This sounds horribly pretentious, but I like to think that if music hadn't existed, I could have invented it..

My operas and my theatre works are very formal pieces..

There are rhythmic ideas which sometimes only work up to a point. In writing there are moments when it just comes off the page, it's not just a colle….

I think music has gone through a period of something very severe, rather radical, rather the way painting did with cubism..

The theatre only knows what it's doing next week, not like the opera, where they say: 'What are we going to do in five years' time?' A completely dif….

Music is such a problem in the time it takes..

I don't have ideas so much as there are things which constantly evolve... there are various threads or layers, if you like, which change..

I wrote music as soon as I knew notation..

One thing I've tried to do in writing music is take on very basic things, very archetypal things..

In the end it doesn't matter what you do..

It's the irrational things that interest me..

I'm not a music lover in the sense that I look for something to have on. I've never had that attitude to music..

I didn't have a record player..

When I was a kid, I wrote music - from the age of 11 until the age of 18..

You either are or you're not..

My operas usually come from musical ideas rather than ideas about subject matter..

When I was confronted with official tuition, the academic thing, I could see no relationship whatever between that and the music I'd been writing sin….

Minimalism now is a reaction to what came before. It's absolutely of its time. Music moved into the set theory thing, and moved out of it..

The opera tells the story with all the built-in contradictions and from many different angles..