With literary fiction, generally a film maker falls in love with a book. In commercial fiction, it's a producer or studio falling in love with a book they can make into a movie with worldwide appeal.
Be generous with your time and money - it has an amazingly fast payback. Be in the moment with everyone you love - and this frequently means tuning out work completely. And drive slow in parking lots.
I love this planet... I want to see the environment preserved and I want to see the human race preserved. And I'd like to see everybody living decently in a more equitable, kind-hearted, thoughtful, generous world.
It's a myth that generally Asians are mostly vegetarians. The Japanese are the kings of red meat, but it's expensive. The Chinese and Vietnamese love their pork. Many Indians, especially the Muslims, can't live without their lamb.
I always think it's important to choose your initial theme very carefully because you're going to be married to it for a long time. You might have to generate an hour's worth of music from a very short, little piece of theme.
Pop comes from the word 'popular,' which means that it could be anything that appeals to any group of people. When you talk about general masses, I think there's elements in every kind of music that can reach a broad audience.
Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.
Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music - not like a record that you'd put on, which would play for a while and finish.
I'm not a big equipment guy; I think that people are a little bit shocked by that. I really don't care about gear in general. I care about people and their intentions to make music - it doesn't matter what equipment you have.
But with rap music - not just N.W.A. - but rap music in general, seeing these artists wearing these team logos all the time started bringing a synergy and energy about having to rep your city, your team, everywhere and all the time.
When I first started to get into writing, it was via music. I'd generate ideas for songs that would turn into stories, then they'd turn into novels. I was biased toward music.
Because of the Thames I have always loved inland waterways - water in general, water sounds - there's music in water. Brooks babbling, fountains splashing. Weirs, waterfalls; tumbling, gushing.
With music, there's a conversation happening. You're hearing what's going on right now, with people's emotional states, in a communal way, and listening to that is really - it's both informative and so generous. It's like emotional news.
To me, a sex scene in a movie generally means a gratuitous scene that doesn't serve the story but gives a kind of excuse - we've got these two actors, we want to see them naked, so let's bring in the music and the soft light.
Social media and music in general have been changing so fast. You can go on Twitter and go from one artist to another. What I really like about it is the opportunity to communicate directly with your fans.
I grew up with the Woodstock generation. I went to Woodstock, and like everybody in my school, I wanted to be in a rock-and-roll band, and most of us were. But I also grew up with a lot of piano lessons and a lot of classical music training.
Each kind of generation of bands forgets how they got here. Waylon Jennings came out and they're like, 'That's not Patsy Cline.' And everyone panicked, like, 'I don't know what happened to country music, but this isn't it.'
Anyone interested in the world generally can't help being interested in young adult culture - in the music, the bands, the books, the fashions, and the way in which the young adult community develops its own language.
I have created hours upon hours of different music over the years that the general public has never heard. Maybe one day I'll release them all in one big package, but we'll see.
Unfortunately, the young generation, who I believe have their own place in the sun like I had mine; but I wish it was possible there were other ways to have them understand this music was here before they came, and the reason that it was here.
With rock music, the amount of power that you can generate, the intensity behind the intentions of your lyrics that you can really reflect through rock music - you can't do that in jazz. You can't do that with classical.
