Sometimes something intrigues me about particular sounds, how they work together, and I think "Okay, I've found something here; I'm going to take it somewhere." And sometimes just to find a name for that sound, whatever it is, ends up becoming a title of the piece or becoming part of the title.

The Marshall guitar amplifier doesn't just get louder when you turn it up. It distorts the sound to produce a whole range of new harmonics, effectively turning a plucked string instrument into a bowed one. A responsible designer might try to overcome this limitation - probably the engineers at Marshall tried, too. But that sound became the sound of, among others, Jimi Hendrix. That sound is called electric guitar.

Quite often, and in fact more often, I would say, I'm struggling all the way through to think, "What is it I like about this? What is the personality of this thing I'm hearing that I like so much?" And it's nearly always a sort of mixed emotion, which is why I like it. It's something that I have mixed feelings about in the sense that it's both, say, placid and dangerous, or bitter and sweet, or dark and bright.

W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you.

A culture is the sum of all the things about which humanity can choose to differ.

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.

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