Quotes About Perception

When you are known as this cutting-edge composer all the time... it's no longer cutting-edge.

The challenge for a good musician is to bring out compositions that seem fresh to the listener, even if the listener has heard the song or the composition before.

If your work doesn't speak to people, it's beyond comprehension and risible, but if people engage with it, you become tarred with the brush of populism.

Coming from a comprehensive school in Somerset, entertainment didn't seem like something that was open to you.

If you close one eye and imagine a bright light constantly in front of the other eye, your vision is compromised. You can only see about 30 percent of what you should be able to see.

Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way.

I proudly tell people, 'I have no computer,' so as not to be ashamed of having no computer.

I don't sit down in front of my computer screen and think, 'Right. Today I shall begin a story set in this or that period of history.' I just get ideas from the world around me.

Computers will understand sarcasm before Americans do.

People don't understand computers. Computers are magical boxes that do things. People believe what computers tell them.

Age and numbers are a concept made up by man.

That whole concept of 'I want to really go after people' - I don't understand that. Is it a roast, or is it an awards show?

We live in a society that compels us to go on using these concepts, and we no longer know what they mean.

Beauty doesn't have to be in accord with prefabricated concepts of 'pretty.'

Conceptual art, I don't even know what that is.

People are really concerned with what other people are saying about them.

And as far as I'm concerned, it's like I say, drugs are not the problem. Other stuff is the problem.

I'm concerned about the unknowability of other people.

As far as I'm concerned, I didn't dream - ever.

As far as I was concerned, either I was a homosexual or I wasn't, so making films would change nothing.

The American people know something is wrong as far as energy is concerned. They don't think they are being told the truth.

I can no more separate my serious concerns about the world from my cockeyed way of seeing it than I can keep apart my personal and professional selves.

For a composer of concert music, 40 is actually very young. But for a rock musician, 40 is almost past due, where you think of rock music as really part of more youth-oriented culture.

After watching a movie, you can't conclude that I am the same person in real life too.