The thing that obsesses me more than anything is waste - the waste of human intelligence and creativity.

Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do & do the last thing on the list.

If you've spent a long time developing a skill and techniques, and now some 14 year-old upstart can get exactly the same result, you might feel a bit miffed I suppose, but that has happened forever.

The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.

I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.

Once music ceases to be ephemeral - always disappearing - and becomes instead material... it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.

Sometimes you recognize that there is a category of human experience that has not been identified but everyone knows about it. That is when I find a term to describe it.