- Philip Glass: One of the things that's different from the way we do theater today is that we don't supply the answers. We don't feel even required to.
- Philip Glass: The point is how we hear. That's the point. The music, in a way, is a self-explanatory experience. The music explains to you how to hear it. That's the importance of it. That's why it's done the way it is. I may not know exactly what you're hearing but I know how you're hearing it.
- Philip Glass: I think it's really interesting to see what possibilities exist within something as highly formulated as an opera. The score is written, the libretto is there, and you say, well how many ways can it be done?
- John DeMain: The first time I heard his music, being a classically trained musician, I wasn't quite ready for the experience. But even aside from the fact of whether I liked it myself, at that point a couple years ago, I realized that he had done something quite extraordinary, and that was that he took music as we know it- melody as we understand it; constant harmony, as the general population sees to most naturally relate to; and recognizable rhythm, strong rhythm- and he took all those elements, which I think are the basic components of music and seem to continue in our pop world, in our rock world- to be still what the human being, being a symmetrical animal with a regular heartbeat responds to and understanding that, he took it and used it in a brand new way.