"Any professional knows that the flute and the piano is a boring combination. All you've got to arrive at is a kind of typical gestural crap, right? You might agree, though you wouldn't call it gestural crap."

"I never feel that my music is sparse or minimalist; the way fat people never really think they're fat. I certainly don't consider myself minimalist at all."

"I was once married to a woman who could eat anything and tell you what was in it: the most complicated recipes. Her memory of taste - now that's what I call memory!"

"Music is essentially built upon primitive memory structures."

"If you think you might have secret information listening to me, you're lost."

"For me it's the instrument. If I want to think of a flute and the state of the arts I hear a vibrato; I don't know what a flute is unless the person plays it for me."

"Since music has never had a Rembrandt, we have remained nothing more than musicians."

"I want to give my compliments to Australia. Ever since your government paid a few million dollars for a Jackson Pollack painting, I figure that it must be a marvellous country."

"No one has the Houdini school of composition."

"I've been living with the minor second all my life and I finally found a way to handle it."