You can’t really imagine music without technology.
You can’t do anything interesting with cutting-edge technology except not make it cutting-edge.
I don’t like celebrity programmes – but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve.
I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.
I’m always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven’t thought of doing yet.
Good teachers realise that the students are the antenna; they are sensing things that the teachers don’t yet sense.
Cultural objects have no notable identity outside of that which we confer upon them. Their value is entirely a product of the interaction that we have with them.
I’m fascinated by musicians who don’t completely understand their territory; that’s when you do your best work.
Some people are very good at being ‘stars’ and it suits them. I’m grudging about it and I find it annoying.
Nothing so dates an era as its conception of the future.
The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten.
I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside.
Genius is individual, scenius is communal.
The thing that obsesses me more than anything is waste – the waste of human intelligence and creativity.
You either believe that people respond to authority, or that they respond to kindness and inclusion. I’m obviously in the latter camp. I think that people respond better to reward than punishment.
I think it’s a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.
People assume that the meaning of a song is vested in the lyrics. To me, that has never been the case. There are very few songs that I can think of where I remember the words.
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.
I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium.
We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.