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

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.

Another way of working is setting deliberate constraints that aren't musical ones - like saying, "Well, this piece is going to be three minutes and nineteen seconds long and it's going to have changes here, here and here, and there's going to be a convolution of events here, and there's going to be a very fast rhythm here with a very slow moving part over the top of it." Those are the sort of visual ideas that I can draw out on graph paper. I've done a lot of film music this way.

You can't do anything interesting with cutting-edge technology except not make it cutting-edge.

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

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.

The point about working is not to produce great stuff all the time, but to remain ready for when you can.