Something I’ve realized lately, to my shock, is that I am an optimist, in that I think humans are almost infinitely capable of self-change and self-modification, and that we really can build the future that we want if we’re smart about it.

What matters in modern music is not the part you can write down, the words and the tune, but the rest - the texture, the atmosphere, the references and associations.

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.

Another way of working is setting deliberate constraints that aren't musical ones - like saying, "Well, this piece is going to be three minutes and nineteen seconds long and it's going to have changes here, here and here, and there's going to be a convolution of events here, and there's going to be a very fast rhythm here with a very slow moving part over the top of it." Those are the sort of visual ideas that I can draw out on graph paper. I've done a lot of film music this way.

The problem with improvisation is, of course, that everyone just slips into their comfort zone and does sort of the easy thing to do, the most obvious thing to do with your instrument.

Admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism.

I don't like celebrity programmes - but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve.