Culture is everything you don't have to do.

People always focus on people like me who use synthesizers, right, which are explicitly electronic and therefore obvious. "Ah, yes, that's electronic music." But they don't realize that so is the concept of actually taking a piece of extant music and literally re-collaging it, taking chunks out and changing the dynamics radically and creating new rhythmic structures with echo and all that. That's real electronic music, as far as I'm concerned.

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

I have a definite talent for convincing people to try something new. I am a good salesman. When I'm on form, I can sell anything.

Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do & do the last thing on the list.

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.

John Cage made you realise that there wasn't a thing called noise, it was just music you hadn't appreciated.