We go on multiplying our conveniences only to multiply our cares. We increase our possessions only to the enlargement of our anxieties.

When we separate music from life we get art.

Next time we need to be on drugs and have lots of suffering and alcohol abuse going on while recording, I’m kinda picturing a Jerry Lee Lewis session from the mid Seventies.

I get a friend to travel with me… I need somebody to bring me back to who I am. It’s hard to be alone.

I started playing piano with a little band in high school. I was terrible. I thought I had absolutely no talent. I couldn’t keep time. I only got into McGill, which was a lousy music...

By the visual pattern, but mostly I’m guided entirely by my ear, what I hear.

There is a paradox because I think you’ve struck a chord there that we ought to simply pursue – it is true that music is a form of communication.

I’ve managed to keep a clear head and remain sane in this business because I remain a kid off-camera.

When he was reading, I would submerge myself into whatever it was he was reading, and I tried to anticipate what would happen next.

I can write music but I’m not much for words.

I prefer ordinary girls – you know, college students, waitresses, that sort of thing. Most of the girls I go out with are just good friends. Just because I go out to the cinema with...

It’s hard to say how you get influenced by something. When you work on something for seven years, it’s bound to make an impression.

All real freedom springs from necessity, for it can be gained only through the exercise of the individual will, and that will can be roused to energetic action only by the force of necessity acting...

We carry our homes within us which enables us to fly.

It doesn’t necessarily mean at all that the composer plays his own works best.

School, I never truly got the knack of. I could never focus on things I didn’t want to learn.

I was blown away by the standing ovation. I’ve had tributes before, sure, but I don’t retain that feeling, and I wasn’t prepared for it on Tuesday. But maybe you shouldn’t retain these things or...

By the way, the point between rationality and what we would call the irrational is a very difficult point to establish. There’s no specific line, as you know.

To the person that deals in visualizations, I suppose there is something rather exciting about a whole set of people – they all going symmetrically, up or down, in a military sort of precision.

I couldn’t deal with playing a character who rides motorcycles and has a leather jacket and is a tough kid, y’know?

If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.

I’m interested in producing a work of art, and unless I hear the thing thoroughly, I would have no reason to put it down at all.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing all the hype that’s written about you… Who knows? In a couple of years, you might find me in the loony bin!

I thought if I could get television interested in opera, it would make a kind of new thing that would allow composers to build a whole new repertoire.

Do not seek for information of which you cannot make use.

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.

Ummm, reach for the stars and keeps your hands on the ground? Something like that? I guess you would end up with your arse in the air.

If you can do what you do best and be happy, you’re further along in life than most people.

I’d met Dr Dre, he was thinking about his next album, we talked a little and he said, ‘Let me give you some of these loops and see what you come up with’.

Every time I’m a bit surprised always, what the patterns look like and what the whole thing looks like because, of course, I primarily hear.

Today each composer is not only involved in aesthetics, but he’s actually trying to create his own language.

I just want to keep doing what I’m doing and hopefully people will watch my movies.

It’s useless to play lullabies for those who cannot sleep.

I like to think I’m straightforward and honest in my dealings with people. I want something good to come out of here cause my name’s on it too.

I’m probably not going to get married unless I live with somebody for 10 or 20 years. But these people (Romeo and Juliet) took a chance and they did it. We don’t have the balls...

Traditions are imploding and exploding everywhere – everything is coming together, for better or worse, and we can no longer pretend we’re all living in different worlds because we’re on different continents.

He who receives a great many letters demanding answer, sees himself as if engaged in a hopeless struggle of one man against the rest of the world.

You reach a certain point in your life where they things you do and say do make a difference.

No, I think that a person writes a poem because they have an inner urge of something that they want to express, and I think it’s that inner urge that you want to express when...

Everywhere I go, somebody is staring at me, I don’t know if people are staring because they recognize me or because they think I’m a weirdo.

I’ve always had a problem with people who couldn’t tell the truth or admit a mistake and say they’re wrong.

Hopefully, I have a certain amount of what you call musical talent.

Today, with a recording, he can hear the thing enough times until he really gets acquainted with the language, and then he can begin to make an estimate of the intrinsic, aesthetic value of that...

I like to be able to play a character and act out a lot of things which I can’t or don’t do in my normal everyday life.

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of...

I’m really interested in writing a piece of music that will move you, that will really move you. That is really the only reason that I’m writing music.

I’m just starting to scratch the surface of what really makes me happy and it’s taken me a while to admit that acting like a little child and being a jerk and a punk is...

I travel the world, and I’m happy to say that America is still the great melting pot – maybe a chunky stew rather than a melting pot at this point, but you know what I...

The more we reduce ourselves to machines in the lower things, the more force we shall set free to use in the higher.

The creative processes are so mysterious.