My interview today with Sir Jonathan Mills, artistic director of the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF), has elicited considerable interest, particularly the points he made about whether next year's festival would reflect the independence referendum.

Newspaper articles cannot use every quote, and although these didn't make the print cut, they are interesting in their own right.

Read the interview with Sir Jonathan Mills

The director and I met on two occasions - these quotes are from our first meeting two weeks ago.

The referendum

"I haven't finally made up my mind, but I have a strong leaning which I am not going to disclose here. Partly because I do not see myself as a political construct, but a cultural one. I don't want people to be diverted - it's my business and my right to be private.

"Whatever the outcome next year is, my question is, is that the end of ambition?

"Whatever one thinks of Mr Salmond, he has been a transformational character for this society and this country. There was a political settlement which, because of its longevity, meant it was asleep at the wheel, and that is a fact. That is not saying I don't like Labour or do like Labour: any party that had been in power as long as it had been in Scotland, there is a process of renewal [needed]. What Mr Salmond has asked is not specifically of renewal in Scotland, but a broader question about the nature of the UK, and good on him, in a way.

"Even if we say we want to remain a Union, he has asked us to think about the future of that Union, and he has asked us to think about it in relation to the power structures, and in a way so we consider what we think is important, what our values are, and what we want the future to be.

"The question of ambition which is most important in the UK is the question of ambition beyond London."

The need for a law to make everyone vote

"I don't believe there can be any true democracy unless you allow yourself one moment that is undemocratic - and say we all have to vote. I think a whole set of rigorous thinking follows from that. My questions on this are procedural."

Geopolitics and cultural hegemony

"I don't believe that one domination or hegemony will replace another. That we have had the European hegemony and now we will have the Asian or Chinese one. I don't believe it will be like that, I think it is too early to tell. There are many plausible reasons to think that may be the case, but it is premature.

"And you should not underestimate Europe and North America's ability to recycle and rejuvenate itself - it is the height of arrogance to suggest we know what the future holds. But from a political perspective, Europe has gone through feudalism, through cycles of industrialisation, of capitalism and a reaction to that, proletarian revolutions in terms of communism and socialism, and the Asian countries are on an entirely different trajectory. It's not better or worse, it's different.

"Where I am heading on this is that we are heading for a period of flux. We may be heading for a diminution of European hegemony, but it may be instead of one power replacing another, and this is perhaps the optimist in me, and maybe the 'Asian centre is about to happen', but rather than saying that, we are entering a period of multiple sources not one.

"So not a Christian-Judaic framing of ethics, or a European way of thinking about science, but actually that, plus a Confucion or Buddhist view of the world in ethics, paralleled with a completely different way of thinking about government and economics and social structures."

On programming

"I approach the festival with the starting point - what is the journey worth taking? I know the repertoire really well. There may be some people out there who say they don't like the choices, but there is no doubt that I don't know the repertoire. I know the music repertoire, the opera repertoire and I have written stuff.  I have the artist's view of it. But how does it inform, in an entertaining and informative and revealing way, how I live my life? That is what I ask."