When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989, my first piano teacher sent me something that Id composed when I was four. I remember I played it, and it still sounded like me. Im the same composer I was then. – Gordon Getty
I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinsons poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano. – Gordon Getty
The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic. – Harold Bloom
I had a great drama teacher, and he sort of made out drama school as this incredibly difficult thing to get into: 6,000 people apply every year, and some of the schools only have 12 places. Its a phenomenally difficult thing to get into. And that excited me – I wanted that challenge. – Jeremy Irvine