The problem with improvisation is, of course, that everyone just slips into their comfort zone and does sort of the easy thing to do, the most obvious thing to do with your instrument.

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.

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.

With strong self-esteem you can climb any mountain and weather any storm.

The most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively rare offense.

Joy is what we all seek. It is an energy more powerful than food. But without love we can not feel true joy.

Compensatory education has been tried and it apparently has failed

Even when we know things, sometimes it takes words to make them concrete.

Sometimes people think if someone has depression, that person must be a broken Mormon. We believe that righteousness is happiness, but what happens when people are righteous and they're not happy?

I adore my apartment in New York. It was a ballroom that I remade, so it's like a loft but done by Louis the Fifteenth.

We want the air to unite the peoples, and not to divide them.

I've dealt with a lot of guns over my career, so I'm getting better and better with firearms.