I got an amazing 10-CD set, it's the music that Alan Lomax recorded in Haiti in 1936. And what's incredible is how fantastic the drummers are and how off-the-grid they are. The liveliness is astonishing; they're just totally alive, these recordings. It's very interesting, to me, to be reminded of that, that there was a time when things were not that tight.

I had a lot of trouble with engineers, because their whole background is learning from a functional point of view, and then learning how to perform that function.

As soon as you externalize an idea you see facets of it that weren't clear when it was just floating around in your head.

Whenever you listen to a piece of music, what you are actually doing is hearing the latest sentence in a very long story you’ve been listening to - all the pieces of music you’ve ever heard.

I always use the same guitar; I got this guitar years and years ago for nine pounds. It's still got the same strings on it.

The reason I don't tour is that I don't know how to front a band. What would I do? I can't really play anything well enough to deal with that situation.

There are hundreds of manufacturers always producing dvices that in general do the same things. Since they have slight structural differences if you take one and fool around with it and give it a good kick it will actually do something that it wasn't designed to do. I have this relationship with my synthesizers. I've had them for so long, and I've never had them serviced, so that now practically all of their functions operate differently from what they were designed to do. They do very interesting things now, but that means nobody else can use them either.