Playing in my early bands, working as a studio musician, producing and going to art school was, in retrospect, my apprenticeship. I was learning and creating a solid foundation of ideas, but I wasn't really playing music.

Anyone who understands Jazz knows that you can't understand it. It's too complicated. That's what's so simple about it.

When I first started making ambient music, I was setting up systems using synthesizers that generated pulses more or less randomly. The end result is a kind of music that continuously changes. Of course, until computers came along, all I could actually present of that work was a piece of its output.

Dancers today can do anything; the technique is phenomenal. The passion and the meaning to their movement can be another thing.

Real music is always revolutionary, for it cements the ranks of the people; it arouses them and leads them onward.

I want to say at once that I frankly believe that Irving Berlin is the greatest songwriter that has ever lived.... His songs are exquisite cameos of perfection, and each one of them is as beautiful as its neighbor. Irving Berlin remains, I think, America's Schubert.