I'm very good with technology, I always have been, and with machines in general. They seem not threatening like other people find them, but a source of fun and amusement.

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.

The past could only control your present and future through your mind. So by all means, guard your mind with the gate of positivity.

The human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature.

The guitar has a kind of grit and excitement possessed by nothing else.

I had two things I could do: I could run over you, and I could put a good stiff arm on you. That was about it.

You will reach a point where you can finally go for an hour, or a day, or a week without painful reminders of absence and emptiness. Look for new awakenings. Be open to rebirth.

And all Niki really has to do now is coast

The older I get and the longer I live in New York City, the more I have the desire to go elsewhere and be surrounded by nature.

After eating a hundred mice, the cat makes a hadj to Mecca.

We have to make ourselves as perfect as we can.

If in fact the conservation and complexification of novelty is what the universe is striving for, then suddenly our own human enterprise, previously marginalized, takes on an immense new importance.