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

It infuriates me that stuff from the Internet routinely doesn't include all the credits. Because as soon as I listen to something, if I like it, I want to know, "Who's the bass player?" "Who did that?" "Who's the engineer on this?

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.

Except in a few cases like Music for Airports, which was a very clear case of noticing a niche [and] saying, "Okay, there's this situation in which people always play music, and nobody has written music for that situation so I'm going to." So, that was a very clear example of spotting a niche and working for it. I have done that occasionally.

One of the things you're doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

I think, if you spend a day or - as many people do - a life working only with that aspect of your being, the cerebrum connected to a finger, I feel that the rest of you atrophies, essentially.

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.