- Terry Riley: The ideas that we have as composers or performers are essentially ideas that come through us in our daily life just as our other experiences happen to us. Some days we might walk out in front of a car, some days, you know, we'll have a great inspiration to write a new orchestral piece. The way I view it now is that you do it always as a practice, as an everyday thing, you have some practices to do to keep you connected to it, to keep you fluent in it, and to keep the devotion there for it, to keep the love of doing it. Then when some kind of special inspiration happens, it creates a new piece or a new area to work on.
- Terry Riley: There's always an endless frontier in music, because we're dealing here with a person's soul, you're dealing with something that's very basic, it's a spiritual element, and so it's not all done because everybody is different. So when a new person- when someone is young and they see the frontiers of music differently than we did and they will hear things we didn't hear. What's going to be happening, I don't know how music will develop. But I feel like all the young musicians I know love it just as much as I do so that makes me think it looks just as exciting and new to them as it did to me.
- Terry Riley: One thing with choirs, you can get this really great human element, you know, it's quite different than with instruments, just the face that it's their voices and when they blend their voices you get this wonderful feeling of humanity, and it seems like there's endless ideas and combinations that can be associated with words and feelings that make composition for voices much easier for me than say, writing for instruments.