Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music - not like a record that you'd put on which would play for a while and finish.

There are certain sounds that I've found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.

For instance I'm always fascinated to see whether given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do and all the things that evolved out of word processing - 'Oh let's put that sentence there let's get rid of this' - have become commonplace in films and music too.

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.

I hate talking about music to tell you the truth.

People do dismiss ambient music don't they? They call it 'easy listening ' as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.

I think we're about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.

I don't like headphones very much and I rarely listen to music on headphones.

It's nice I think when people use your music for things you didn't think of.

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

The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don't set out to say anything very important.

Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very very rich and complex and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.

I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.

That's why people listen to music or look at paintings. To get in touch with that wholeness.

My job in this life is to give people spiritual ecstasy through music. In my concerts people cry laugh dance. If they climaxed spiritually I did my job. I did it decently and honestly.

First of all the music that people call Latin or Spanish is really African. So Black people need to get the credit for that.

I was never too keen on the British music press. They've called us a supermarket hype and they used to suggest that we didn't write our own songs.

Music can be made anywhere is invisible and does not smell.

Pop is actually my least favorite kind of music because it lacks real depth.

Music I heard with you was more than music and bread I broke with you was more than bread. Now that I am without you all is desolate all that was once so beautiful is dead.

The bottom line is I tend to be going back to older and older music.

I mean music totally comes from your soul.

Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.