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.

Ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

If there is a new fascism, it won't come from skinheads and punks; it will come from people who eat granola and think they know how the world should be.

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 occasionally meet people and they say, 'Oh, I was born to Discreet Music'... They always have very weird eyes, those people.

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

I make a lot of pieces of music that I never release as CDs.