ANDRE PREVIN

When you're working with music that is invariably better than you are, it's difficult to become swell-headed.

I'm on very good terms with all my former wives.

John Williams is, without question, talented. He writes very good scores and very good melodies and all that.

I admire Elliott Carter endlessly. But I have no ambitions to emulate him.

I run around so much that I finally reasoned that composing is the one musical endeavour which you can do anywhere, anytime.

When I composed, I heard my music played by the orchestra within days of completion of the score. No master at a conservatory, no matter how revered, can teach as much by verbal criticism as can a cold and analytical hearing of one's own music being played.

I have a great many shortcomings, but writing for something on time has never bothered me.

I stuck around in Hollywood for too long. I was there a long time, and when I left, I was smart enough to realise that what I was leaving was not just the movie business. I wanted to get rid of the whole atmosphere.

I've had the healthy and sobering experience of constantly working with music that is invariably better than any performance of it can be.

At MGM, you knew you were going to be working next year; you knew you were going to get paid. But I was too ambitious musically to settle for it. And I wanted to gamble with whatever talent I might have had.

A Beethoven symphony should be rehearsed like chamber music, only for a lot more people.

People who don't do jazz think it's black magic. But really, it's just a matter of getting used to it. It's fun to gamble. The trick is not to fall back on the things you've done before.

Elliott Carter does not write the kind of music that the kids go off to school whistling.

I finally wasn't interested in writing music that played while actors talked.

I don't even have a cell phone. I don't know how they work.

I found that jazz musicians, possibly more than their classical counterparts, wear long-standing friendships easily and gracefully.

I don't write things that are wildly abstractly atonal.

Music critics have made it quite clear that any composer who ever contributed a four-bar jingle to a film was to be referred to as a 'Hollywood composer' from then on, even if the rest of his output were to consist solely of liturgical organ sonatas.

I don't ever consciously change gears when I play jazz or classical. It's all music.

I absolutely insist upon adequate rehearsal time - particularly for the pieces that orchestras know best. Because there, the tendency is not to take them apart - rediscover them - and you must.

There's a small group of music critics in the States who will forgive you anything - jazz, a long prison term, or what have you - anything but scoring a Hollywood musical.

The thing is that I'm naturally curious about a lot of different disciplines in music, and I enjoy doing them. And as long as people are nice enough to let me, I'll keep on trying.

It's been thrown up to me most of my life: Why don't I just concentrate on conducting or composing or my own playing or on jazz?

I used to set myself little challenges to make the work more interesting.

I remain extraordinarily proud of the Vaughan Williams symphonies I recorded with the LSO, and in the 1980s and '90s, I made an almost complete cycle of orchestral works by Richard Strauss with the Vienna Philharmonic.