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A part of me has become immortal, out of my control.

Agressive music can only shock you once. Afterwards its impact declines. It's inevitable.

As soon as I hear a sound, it always suggests a mood to me.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

Every collaboration helps you grow. With Bowie, it's different every time. I know how to create settings, unusual aural environments. That inspires him. He's very quick.

For me it's always contingent on getting a sound-the sound always suggests what kind of melody it should be. So it's always sound first and then the line afterwards.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

I'm not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.

I always use the same guitar; I got this guitar years and years ago for nine pounds. It's still got the same strings on it.

I don't live in the past at all; I'm always wanting to do something new. I make a point of constantly trying to forget and get things out of my mind.

I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.

I felt extremely uncomfortable as the focal point, in the spotlight. I really like the behind the scenes role, because all my freedom is there.

I had a lot of trouble with engineers, because their whole background is learning from a functional point of view, and then learning how to perform that function.

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.

I hate the rock music tradition. I can't bear it!

I have a definite talent for convincing people to try something new. I am a good salesman. When I'm on form, I can sell anything.

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

I often work by avoidance.

I take sounds and change them into words.

I think generally playing live is a crap idea. So much of stage work is the presentation of personality, and I've never been interested in that.

I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.

I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.

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've discovered this new electronic technique that creates new speech out of stuff that's already there.

If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn't bother to find new ones.

If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.

If you watch any good player, they're using different parts of their body and working with instruments that respond to those movements. They're moving in many dimensions at once.

If you're in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.

In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.

It's not the destination that matters. It's the change of scene.

Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don't fit in a very interesting way.

Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.

Musicians are there in front of you, and the spectators sense their tension, which is not the case when you're listening to a record. Your attention is more relaxed. The emotional aspect is more important in live music.

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.

My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.

Nearly all the things I do that are of any merit at all start off just being good fun, and I think I'm sort of building up to doing something else quite soon.

One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn't if you knew better.

People assume that the meaning of a song is vested in the lyrics. To me, that has never been the case. There are very few songs that I can think of where I remember the words.

Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!

Set up a situation that presents you with something slightly beyond your reach.

The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.

The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don't set out to say anything very important.

The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.

The reason I don't tour is that I don't know how to front a band. What would I do? I can't really play anything well enough to deal with that situation.

We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.

When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground. It was the background that interested me.

When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.

I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium.

Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You're glad someone's done it but you don't necessarily want to listen to it.

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.

Most game music is based on loops effectively.

I'm always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven't thought of doing yet.

Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when - and he won't necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.

People do dismiss ambient music, don't they? They call it 'easy listening,' as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.

People tend to play in their comfort zone, so the best things are achieved in a state of surprise, actually.

Honor thy error as a hidden intention.

I believe in singing.

When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That's one of the great feelings - to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing - 'Oh, let's put that sentence there, let's get rid of this' - have become commonplace in films and music too.

I do sometimes look back at things I've written in the past, and think, 'I just don't remember being the person who wrote that.'

For instance, I'm always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.

I think most artists would be happy to have bigger audiences rather than smaller ones. It doesn't mean that they are going to change their work in order necessarily to get it, but they're happy if they do get it.

Every band I've worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they've gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

It must be quite mysterious to some people why I bother to carry on. Because, you know, I don't sell that many records.

I make a lot of pieces of music that I never release as CDs.

I've got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.

In England and Europe, we have this huge music called ambient - ambient techno, ambient house, ambient hip-hop, ambient this, ambient that.

Everybody thinks that when new technologies come along that they're transparent and you can just do your job well on it. But technologies always import a whole new set of values with them.

The computer brings out the worst in some people.

The artists of the past who impressed me were the ones who really focused their work.

Even though I'm known as a pop musician, I have a seriousness about what I do.

The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.

Everybody is entertained to death.

I know that if I had a television in my flat I would convince myself that everything on it was really interesting. I would say, 'I'm a Celebrity - Get Me Out of Here!' is so sociologically fascinating that I think I'd better watch.

I think we're about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.

I'd love it if American kids were listening to Muslim music.

It's actually very easy for democracy to disappear.

Law is always better than war.

You either believe that people respond to authority, or that they respond to kindness and inclusion. I'm obviously in the latter camp. I think that people respond better to reward than punishment.

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

If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas.

If you are part of a religion that very strongly insists that you believe then to decide not to do that is quite a big hurdle to jump over. You never forget the thought process you went through. It becomes part of your whole intellectual picture.

Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop.

I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.

I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.

There are certain sounds that I've found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.

Once music ceases to be ephemeral - always disappearing - and becomes instead material... it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.

If you've spent a long time developing a skill and techniques, and now some 14 year-old upstart can get exactly the same result, you might feel a bit miffed I suppose, but that has happened forever.

I want to rethink 'surrender' as an active verb.

I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens.

My shows are not narratives.

I think audiences are quite comfortable watching something coming into being.

I think one of my pursuits over the years is trying to answer the question of, 'What else can you do with a voice other than stand in front of a microphone and sing?'

Well, there are some things that I just can't get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while. Sometimes they're of my own creation, as well - and they're just as annoying. It's not only other people's ear worms that bug me, it's my own, as well.

I love good, loud speakers.

I don't like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.

Painting, I think it's like jazz.

I've noticed a terrible thing, which is I will agree to anything if it's far enough in the future.

The dominant theory coming out of Hollywood is that peoples' attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and they need more stimulation.

I think it's a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.

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