Growing up, you have all these ideas, and then you're confronted and faced with the real world for the first time. And you have to think of what you want your life to be.

We have a strong tradition in Toronto of really great film writers, and growing up in that climate is a big reason I pursued cinema studies.

My grandmother is British. She was in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force during World War II. That's where she met my grandfather, who was sailing for the British Royal Navy. She was a war bride.

My grandmother was British and in the Women's Auxiliary Royal Air Force in World War II.

Reviewing music or reviewing anything is a writing job. It's nice if you are experienced in the field you are writing about, but writing is what you are doing.

I don't feel when I'm writing that I'm drawing from any other writer, but of course I must be. The writers I've admired have been not so very different from myself: Evelyn Waugh, for example, that kind of crystalline prose. And I've always admired W. Somerset Maugham more than any other writer.

There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don't exist.

I can't satisfy myself with just trying to tie all of my imagination into music, especially when music is not appreciated as an art form as much as it used to be.