I think that's very significant that we're so attached to the idea now of - it was something I advocated for years, that you can make music in studios, music doesn't have to be made as a real-time experience. But now you see the results of that in people who are completely crippled unless they know that they have the possibility of "cut and paste" and "undo." And "undo" and "undo" and "undo" and "undo" and "undo" again.

A lot of the so-called systems composers have this thing that the system is always right. You don't fiddle with it at all. Well, I don't think that. I think the system is as right as you judge it to be. If for some reason you don't like a bit of it you must trust your intuition on that. I don't take a doctrinaire approach to systems.

I occasionally meet people and they say, 'Oh, I was born to Discreet Music'... They always have very weird eyes, those people.

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

People who are very confident in themselves aren't hurt by criticism. They make use of it.

I'm actually an evangelical atheist, but there is something I recognise about religion: that it gives people a chance to surrender.

Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You're glad someone's done it but you don't necessarily want to listen to it.