The trouble with New Age music is that there's no evil in it.

A big ego isn't necessarily a bad thing. A big ego means that you have some confidence in your abilities, really, and that you're prepared to take the risk of trying them out.

Most big concerts sound disgusting and awful and insultingly bad. It's like going to the cinema and been shown a scratchy film which is upsidedown and the bulb had gone on the projector. The quality of large-scale live music is so shocking.

I think the other thing that's important is getting to a place, which very, very rarely happens with improvising groups, where somebody can decide not to play for a while. You watch any group of musicians improvising together and they nearly all play nearly all the time. In fact I often say that the biggest difference between classical music and everything else is that classical musicians sometimes shut up because they're told to, because the score tells them to. Whereas any music that's sort of based on folk or jazz, everybody plays all the time.

In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, it now seems clear that the shock of the attacks was exploited in America.

Of course, like anybody I repeat myself endlessly, but I don't know that I'm doing it, usually.

The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band