The point about working is not to produce great stuff all the time, but to remain ready for when you can.

You can't do anything interesting with cutting-edge technology except not make it cutting-edge.

I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do.

I have these headphones, which pretty much exclude everything else so that you can really completely control the sound that you're hearing. I don't use them very much, I have to say. I very rarely listen on headphones.

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

There are certain sounds that I've found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.

Except in a few cases like Music for Airports, which was a very clear case of noticing a niche [and] saying, "Okay, there's this situation in which people always play music, and nobody has written music for that situation so I'm going to." So, that was a very clear example of spotting a niche and working for it. I have done that occasionally.