Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music - not like a record that you'd put on, which would play for a while and finish.

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.

Don't think that just because you made it to the next level that the haters and naysayers disappear. Remember, new levels bring new devils.

And what so tedious as a twice-told tale.

I'm trying to practice owning less stuff.

The Hollywood executives are, like, ‘We’re not racist, we just have to pretend to be racists because we’re capitalists. We want to sell our movies in China (and) they don’t like Kevin Hart.’

Any effect, constant, theorem or equation named after Professor X was first discovered by Professor Y , for some value of Y not equal to X.

Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.

I think space will be conquered through the mind rather than the clumsy medium of space travel.

Cities - I'm attracted to them, and I have a special attachment to New York...it's my place.

There's something scary about stupidity made coherent.

Love, work and knowledge are the well-springs of our life. They should also govern it.