Pastoral Resources

My attitude to writing is like when you do wallpapering, you remember where all the little bits are that don't meet. And then your friends say: It's terrific!

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

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.

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 since I was 11.

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 collection of notes.

As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.

I've been writing Indian music for a while. Indian music is about Mother Earth, and mine is no exception.

I intend to keep writing Christmas songs. There's still a lot more about Christmas that can be captured and feel like old-time Christmas. A lot of the traditions haven't been explained in song.

When I started writing it was kind of hard getting people to do my stuff. They' say they couldn't do my style.

When I was young, I just sat down and started playing Chopsticks at the piano. I got so far and then lost interest. Eventually, I regained it and started writing songs.

Living composers writing for big band are very few and far between. There are not a lot of them, and I have a talent for doing it. I am zeroing in on what I do best.

One of the problems of writing is that anyone who commits themselves to that process has to believe that they're good.

For some reason, the concept of writing with swing chords was intimidating.

I started acting when I was in high school, started writing when I got to New York in 1975.

I'm writing a film. With our access to these powerful media, we're going to take over, because it's really disgusting what is put out there now to be consumed.

We had offers to go everywhere and we could have done them. But what would have been the point? We were tired. We had worked hard and needed a break before we got stale. We spent six months at home and writing songs.

Never in our country's history have we witnessed a natural disaster that has impacted so many people in such a wide area. In fact, as of the writing of this column, millions of people along the Gulf Coast have been displaced from their homes in a period of only five days.

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.