“Because music, like color, or a cloud, is neither intelligent nor unintelligent - it just is. The chord, the simplest building block for even the tritest, silliest chart song, is a beautiful, perfect, mysterious thing, and when an ill-read, uneducated, uncultured, emotionally illiterate boor puts a couple of them together, he has every chance of creating something wonderful and powerful. All I ask of music is that is sounds good.”

“My interest in making music has been to create something that does not exist that I would like to listen to. I wanted to hear music that had not yet happened, by putting together things that suggested a new thing which did not yet exist.”

“Music on the radio. When I went in, the big bands were just getting up a good head of steam. Now every song sounds like it's about fucking.”

“He's a man [George W. Bush] who is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is a man who is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.”

“When she sings that song you're with that elderly couple in that pub in Deptford and the mundane becomes romantic and beautiful and I think that's probably the great thing about any sort of paintings or music or something, is just when nothing becomes everything ”

“The music sounded crazy. Crazy—as if Blake had never known how to create a coherent song on a musical instrument.Maybe this Livia thing has finally broken him. A soul like Blake’s can’t make it in this world.”