If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.

If something is good, you must torture it mercilessly until it is either dead or great.

I cant duplicate my own successes, because part of the creation of that effect is making something happen that you didn't expect

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

When you build a building, you finish a building. You don't finish a garden; you start it, and then it carries on with its life. So my analogy was really to say that we composers or some of us should think of ourselves as people who start processes rather than finish them. And there might be surprises.

I've got nothing against records - I've spent my life making them - but they are a kind of historical blip.

The thing that obsesses me more than anything is waste - the waste of human intelligence and creativity.