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

I'm not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.

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.

Some people say Bowie is all surface style and second-hand ideas, but that sounds like a definition of pop to me.

Most big concerts sound disgusting and awful and insultingly bad. It's like going to the cinema and been shown a scratchy film which is upsidedown and the bulb had gone on the projector. The quality of large-scale live music is so shocking.

With devices my technique is always to hide the handbook in the drawer until I've played with it for a while. The handbook always tells you what it does, and you can be quite sure that if it's a complex device it can do at least fifteen other things that weren't predicted in the handbook, or that they didn't consider desirable. It's normally those other things that interest me.

When people censor themselves they're just as likely to get rid of the good bits as the bad bits.