All the best lyrics are written in ten minutes.

I have lived in countries that were coming out of conflict: Ireland, South Africa, the Czech republic. People there are overflowing with energy.

Ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences.

The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band

I had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny. I thought it was a magic thing. I never got one until just before I went to art school.

My guitar only has five strings 'cause the top one broke and I decided not to put it back on: when I play chords I only play bar chords, and the top one always used to cut me there.

Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about.

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

Well, I am a dilettante. It's only in England that dilettantism is considered a bad thing. In other countries it's called interdisciplinary research.

Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

What makes loneliness an anguish is not that I have no one to share my burden, but this: I have only my own burden to bear.

A great ancient poet was blind. A great classical composer was deaf. Many of us are dumb. What have we to show for it?

You oughtn't to yield to temptation. Well, somebody must, or the thing becomes absurd.

I think I'm attracted to writers who tell us something about ourselves.

The curiosity of cats is, like their affection, of a purity and intensity rarely seen in humans. We would be jaded when faced with the fiftieth paper bag. Not so our cats.

Stood I, O Nature! man alone in thee, Then were it worth one's while a man to be.

If people insist on living as if there's no tomorrow, there really won't be one.

I maintain that the maxim is still to be faster than the others.

Acting can be a very reactive profession. Acting is a fantastic thing, and it's my life, but writing is also part of me too, so I did it and in so doing took responsibility for my own life.

Leadership is like beauty - it's hard to define but you know it when you see it.