If you are part of a religion that very strongly insists that you believe then to decide not to do that is quite a big hurdle to jump over. You never forget the thought process you went through. It becomes part of your whole intellectual picture.
The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.
I have a definite talent for convincing people to try something new. I am a good salesman. When I'm on form, I can sell anything.
Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.
I'm always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven't thought of doing yet.
When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground. It was the background that interested me.
Musicians are there in front of you, and the spectators sense their tension, which is not the case when you're listening to a record. Your attention is more relaxed. The emotional aspect is more important in live music.
People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.
Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.
I'm very good with technology, I always have been, and with machines in general. They seem not threatening like other people find them, but a source of fun and amusement.
I don't live in the past at all; I'm always wanting to do something new. I make a point of constantly trying to forget and get things out of my mind.
If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas.
When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it's done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.
I'd been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it's environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this 'ambient music.' But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes.
If you watch any good player, they're using different parts of their body and working with instruments that respond to those movements. They're moving in many dimensions at once.
I think there's a lot of similarity between what people try to do with religion with what they want from art. In fact, I very specifically think that they are same thing. Not that religion and art are the same, but that they both tap into the same need we have for surrender.
Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness.
I take sounds and change them into words.
Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about.
What I believe is that people have many modes in which they can be. When we live in cities, the one we are in most of the time is the alert mode. The 'take control of things' mode, the 'be careful, watch out' mode, the 'speed' mode - the 'Red Bull' mode, actually. There's nothing wrong with it. It's all part of what we are.
