I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.

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

Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about.

I think one of my pursuits over the years is trying to answer the question of 'what else can you do with a voice other than stand in front of a microphone and sing?'

You know that in order to copyright material somebody has to write it down for you. Any piece of recorded material has to be scored in order for it to be copyrighted. I've seen the scores of my things and they don't resemble the music in any way. If you give them to somebody who has never heard the music and say, "What does this sound like to you?" they'll play you something that has no relationship with the music it derives from. Notation simply isn't adequate.

Admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism.

One way of working is just bring a group of totally different musicians together and encourage them to stick to their guns, not to do the thing that normally happens in a working situation where everyone homogenizes and concedes certain points - so eventually they're all playing in roughly the same style. I wanted quite the opposite of that. I wanted them to accent their styles, so that they pulled away. So there would be a kind of space in the middle where I could operate, and attempt to make these things coalesce in some way. In fact quite a lot of my stuff has arisen from that.