“A lot of things like Music For Airports came out of that Borgesian idea that you could invent a world in reverse, by inventing the artefacts that ought to be in it first: you think of what kind of music would be in that world, then you make the music and the world forms itself around the music.”

“What makes humans different from everything else that we know is that we can imagine a future that doesn’t yet exist. So we can constantly make new realities in our minds. And then we can live in those realities, we can experience them. We call that a ‘gift of imagination.’ When a society loses its respect for this gift, that society has stopped developing, stop progressing. Whenever you see a government doing this, you see the beginning of the end of society. The active imagination is the thing that makes us human and makes us capable of thinking of a better future, thinking of the world in a new different way.”

“We should imagine we’re making hypothetical film soundtracks, not making songs. This is always a very liberating idea, because a film soundtrack doesn’t have to have a center – the film itself is the center. It allows you to make music that is pure atmosphere.”

“In modern recording one of the biggest problems is that you’re in a world of endless possibilities. So I try to close down possibilities early on. I limit choices. I confine people to a small area of manoeuvre. There’s a reason that guitar players invariably produce more interesting music than synthesizer players: you can go through the options on a guitar in about a minute, after that you have to start making aesthetic and stylistic decisions. This computer can contain a thousand synths, each with a thousand sounds. I try to provide constraints for people.”

“One of my mottoes is that if you want to get unusual results, work fast and work cheap, because there’s more of a chance that you’ll get somewhere that nobody else did.”

“The point about working is not to produce great stuff all the time, but to remain ready for when you can. There’s no point in saying, ‘I don’t have an idea today, so I’ll just smoke some drugs.’ You should stay alert for the moment when a number of things are just ready to collide with one another… The reason to keep working is almost to build a certain mental tone, like people talk about body tone. You have to move quickly when the time comes, and the time might come very infrequently – once or twice a year, or even less.”

“If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.”

“I think that sex, drugs, art and religion very much overlap with one another and sometimes one becomes another. So I thought, ‘What do all those things have in common?’ The umbrella that they all exist under is this word, ‘surrender’ because they are all forms of transcendence through surrender. They are ways of transcending your individuality and sense of yourself as a totally separate creature in the world. All of those things involve some kind of loosening of this boundary that is around this thing you call ‘yourself’.”