In my normal life I'm a very unadventurous person.

John Cage made you realise that there wasn't a thing called noise, it was just music you hadn't appreciated.

The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one's furniture.

I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.

All the best lyrics are written in ten minutes.

I'm struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity.

Everything is an experiment until it has a deadline. That gives it a destination, context, and a reason.