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

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

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

Since I have always preferred making plans to executing them, I have gravitated towards situations and systems that, once set into operation, could create music with little or no intervention on my part. That is to say, I tend towards the roles of planner and programmer, and then become an audience to the results

A studio is an absolute labyrinth of possibilities - this is why records take so long to make because there are millions of permutations of things you can do. The most useful thing you can do is to get rid of some of those options before you start

Once you've grown to accept something and it becomes part of the system you've inherited, you don't even notice it any longer.

When you look back on a historical period of music, it seems so obvious to you what the characteristics of it are, but they're not obvious at the time. So, when I look back at my own work, I could easily write a very convincing sort of account of it that made it look like I had planned it all out from day one and that this led logically to that and then I did this and then that followed quite naturally from that. But that's not how it felt.