I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do.

I have lived in countries that were coming out of conflict: Ireland, South Africa, the Czech republic. People there are overflowing with energy.

Ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences.

The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band

I had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny. I thought it was a magic thing. I never got one until just before I went to art school.

My guitar only has five strings 'cause the top one broke and I decided not to put it back on: when I play chords I only play bar chords, and the top one always used to cut me there.

Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about.

Everything is an experiment until it has a deadline. That gives it a destination, context, and a reason.

Well, I am a dilettante. It's only in England that dilettantism is considered a bad thing. In other countries it's called interdisciplinary research.

Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

Some of the best stories start out with a person who absolutely does not want anything to do with an adventure.

Never job backwards. What might have been was a waste of time.

You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living.

You have to decide at the end of the day if you can live with yourself.

Integrity means having the courage to do what is right, and what is aligned with your values, no matter the situation.

Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing.

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

Now that I exist in the mainstream majority, I'm not really so controversial any more, am I? Not really news.

It's true, I don't like the real world.

You live by the light of the moon, and I live by desire.