The composer does not sit around and wait for an inspiration to walk up and introduce itself…Making music is actually little else than a matter of invention aided and abetted by emotion. In composing we combine what we know of music with what we feel.

I listened to music from Tatum and Erroll Garner to Mozart. I've composed since I was 10 years old – I used to do 20% my own pieces and 80% other people's; now it's turned the other way. After a certain time you discover the Mozart in you, the Duke Ellington or Billy Strayhorn in you. It takes time to discover yourself. You also have to find and keep players who are in tune with what you're doing; you have that empathy, the quality of breathing together.

Being a composer, although I think it’s an incredible job, it’s not special. There are a lot of people who are composers. There are a lot of people who think they’re composers. There are a lot of people who are songwriters. There are a lot of people who have a musical idea. There are more now probably than there were when I began. There’s more opportunity, I think, for composers than there was back then, but there are many more composers now. So, you’re not special. You’ve got to find some way of getting hired. And I think the more you can refine your objectives, the better you are. The best advice I got about this when I was just starting was, “Ignore all of my advice and do anything you can think of”. And as I said, just get started. Just start.

I meet amateur composers all the time who have music flooding through their heads, apparently, but they have no technical ability at all. They don’t actually have the faintest idea how to put it down on the page. These days you can actually get away with that, because you sort of mess around and track it, and all those things. But to my mind, that balance between the excitement of what is called inspiration or just simply a good idea, and the technical routine that goes into writing music down at all, is what makes a composer. You can’t have one without the other and be a complete composer. I can’t imagine how you could.

When a composer feels a responsibility to make, rather than accept, he eliminates from the area of possibility all events that do not suggest that at that point in time vogue of profundity, for he takes himself seriously, wishes to be considered great, and he thereby diminishes his love and increases his fear and concern about what people will think.

Leave off driving your composers. It might prove to be as dangerous as it is generally unnecessary. After all, composing cannot be turned out like spinning or sewing. Some respected colleagues (Bach, Mozart, Schubert) have spoilt the world terribly. But if we can’t imitate them in the beauty of their writing, we should certainly beware of seeking to match the speed of their writing. It would also be unjust to put all the blame on idleness alone. Many factors combine to make writing harder for us (my contemporaries), and especially me. If, incidentally, they would use us poets for some other purpose, they would see that we are thoroughly and naturally industrious dispositions . . . . I have no time: otherwise I should love to chat on the difficulty of composing and how irresponsible publishers are.

To be simply a poorly paid or seldom played composer seems so tragic to me. But to be a woman composer with all the trials and tribulations that seem to go along with being a woman composer, puts everything in perspective. The struggle becomes heroic--not pitiful. The success becomes a success for all of us in the cause, not something merely egoistic.

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.

It may not have had the glamor of being a film composer or being a pop star or whatever, but that’s not what I wanted. I just wanted the opportunity to be all the kinds of people I could be as a composer. I could be serious, I could be humorous, I could be evil, I could be nice and innocent, I could do angry music, I could do all sorts of things. So that was very fulfilling as a composer. And it kept me interested for my whole musical lifetime.

I think any composer is the sum of their life experience, and that's what makes each of them interesting and different.

For the same reasons a music composer writes its own symphony, whereas others already did the same things, but differently.

I can respect the artistic aim of a composer if he arrives at the so-called modern idiom after an intense period of preparation…Such composers know what they are doing when they break a law; they know what to react against, because they have had experience in the classical forms and style. Having mastered the rules, they know which can be violated and which should be obeyed. But, I am sorry to say, I have found too often that young composers plunge into the writing of experimental music with their school lessons only half learned. Too much radical music is sheer sham, for this very reason: its composer sets about revolutionizing the laws of music before he learned them himself.

Composers have to be schooled in a deep-seated tradition and learn skills that go back not just generations but centuries. So, you find that even the most thrusting, cutting-edge modernists have a deep knowledge of musical history, and a respect for musical history, and indeed the values and worlds that produced those traditions, including religion. That kind of culture-war stuff that you get sometimes in the other arts just doesn’t really appear in the world of music, because there’s this deep knowledge, respect, understanding, and learning about the art of music. For that reason, you find lots of composers who are all over the place politically, but on many things you could say that they are conserving an ancient craft, an ancient tradition. They’re deeply plugged into the roots and in ways that sometimes other artists and other media are not.