You can't have a relationship with a device whose limits are unknown to you, because without limits, it keeps becoming something else.

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.

Books. The reading, writing and cultivation of books is my form of meditation. The books in my life have brought me closest to divinity.

In contrast to logic, there is common sense, or still better, the Spirit of Reasonableness.

The human being is a skin-covered petrie dish.

Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing, 'Yes, gravity is real! I will have faith!'

Children - if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children - children lie all the time

Who should know better than a cosmetician that human beings are less than rational creatures?

Songwriting's a weird game.

I don't want to be just another blade of grass.

I would love to hear someone write a song like 'He Stopped Loving Her Today' rather than 'You're hot. I'm hot. We're in a truck.' It's just mind-numbing to me.

As chaste as unsunned snow.