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.

When I have a terrible need of – shall I say the word – religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.

I’ve been composing music all my life and if I’d been clever enough at school I would like to have gone to music college.

Painting is concerned with all the 10 attributes of sight; which are: Darkness, Light, Solidity and Colour, Form and Position, Distance and Propinquity, Motion and Rest.

I’ve had a fan who made a painting of my face with her fingers. I have put it up in my room. It was sweet and very different.

I’ve just finished my 20th book this past year and I’m working on my 21st book about the Middle East right now that I’ll finish this year. And I get up early in the morning and when I get tired of the computer and tired of doing research, I walk 20 steps out to my woodshop and I either build furniture or paint paintings. I’m an artist too.

Human beings need stories, and we’re looking for them in all kinds of places; whether it’s television, whether it’s comic books or movies, radio plays, whatever form, people are hungry for stories.

It’s easy to make an album full of great songs. But I want people to go for the ride. The songs have to make sense together.

‚Kiss Land‘ is the story after ‚Trilogy‘; it’s pretty much the second chapter of my life. The narrative takes place after my first flight; it’s very foreign, very Asian-inspired. When people ask me, ‚Why Japan?‘ I simply tell them it’s the furthest I’ve ever been from home. It really is a different planet.

If it weren’t for painting, I wouldn’t live; I couldn’t bear the extra strain of things.

I didn’t watch ‚The A-Team‘ movie. I’m an artist. You can’t re-paint a Rembrandt. You can’t duplicate that; I don’t care who you get.

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

In its primary aspect, a painting has no more spiritual message than an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass. The channels by which all noble and imaginative work in painting should touch the soul are not those of the truths of lives.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.

History is written by the victors.

It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to have to paint it.

Most game music is based on loops effectively.

I think sometimes – not always – I write songs that are accessible.

Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.

When you draw or paint a tree, you do not imitate the tree; you do not copy it exactly as it is, which would be mere photography. To be free to paint a tree or a flower or a sunset, you have to feel what it conveys to you: the significance, the meaning of it.

I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

Music has to be sort of ignorable sometimes.

I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn’t that spectacular.

Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music – not like a record that you’d put on, which would play for a while and finish.

I play a lot of instruments. I write all my own music. I spend hours and hours a day in the studio. I’m a producer. I’m a writer.

I thought that I wrote songs and wrote music, and that was sort of what I thought I was best at doing. And because nobody else was ever doing my songs, I felt – you know, I had to go out and do them.

There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

That’s the thing about pictures: they seduce you.

People do dismiss ambient music, don’t they? They call it ‚easy listening,‘ as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.

I didn’t know the term ‚synesthesia‘ until I was working on ‚Cruel Summer.‘ Halfway into writing that, I really understood that, my entire life, I had been trying to describe this condition of mine: through painting, through this seven-screen Surround Vision film we shot in Qatar, through all these things.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

Every story has its demands.

Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.

Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we’ve been having with painting. There’s no way of looking at art as though you hadn’t seen art before.

When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.

Usually I start with a beat, I start making a beat, and my producer side is making the beat. And on a good day, my rapper side will jump in and start the writing process – maybe come up with a hook or start a verse. Sometimes it just happens like that. A song like ‚Lights Please‘ happens like that.

The way ‚Lux‘ was made is that there are 12 sections in here, though two of them are joined together. So there are really 11 sections, in a sense, and each one uses five notes out of a palette of seven notes, and my palette is all the white notes on the piano. That was the original palette.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

I push myself in a lot of aspects when I write a song. I write a piece and where most people would stop and say, ‚Oh, that’s the hook right there,‘ I’ll move that to the first four bars of the verse and do a new hook.

When I’m making music, I can hear all the parts, all the instruments. I can hear what it should be.

Any artist, the work you do, if it’s a painting or if it’s a performance, you hope it translates to a common denominator with the people that they see something in their own life in there. Or they see something in somebody else’s life. That’s what’s fun about sharing art.

Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.

My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.

Obviously, the cinematography of films is art, just as a still shot can be art. If I’m watching a Wes Anderson movie, the colour palettes alone, and the way they’re painted, could be art. With music, you’re a little bit limited, of course, because it’s only audio.

The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it.

Jesus lived a life that was full of joy and contradictions and fights, you know? If they were to paint a picture of Jesus without contradictions, the gospels would be fake, but the contradictions are a sign of authenticity.

No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.

Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare.

Once music ceases to be ephemeral – always disappearing – and becomes instead material… it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.

When you write a song like ‚Forrest Gump,‘ the subject can’t be androgynous. It requires an unnecessary amount of effort.

We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.

My paintings have gotten to be pretty popular and I’ve taken a little bit more interest in painting the last few years. In fact, my novel that I wrote not too long ago, ‚The Hornet’s Nest,‘ I painted the cover picture for it and I do a good bit of painting now.

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

If you hear a voice within you say ‚you cannot paint,‘ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

When I see a story, I ask: is this something I’d like to be in? Is this something I’d like to see? And if I’d like to see it, would I like to tell it?

A properly balanced story provides an equal representation of the negative and positive attributes of, I could say the world, but it’s actually a being. ‚Harry Potter“s a good example. So Harry’s the hero, right. But he’s tainted with evil. There’s a dark and a light in every bit of that narrative. It’s well balanced.

A good picture is equivalent to a good deed.