Terry Riley Quotes

The great thing about string quartets is the players are kind of like family. They work really well as a unit, so you can write things that let them use those talents of association and intuition-all the things they've developed together as a group.

I had already done Rainbow in Curved Air and had a big record on CBS. I was launched to have a long career and then I just dropped out and went to India.

The incredible thing about the human mind is that is didn't come with an instruction book.

I had always been more interested in playing and improvising than sitting down at a desk and writing out a piece. I'd always found it more fun to play, and the other a little bit tedious. I always had trouble with the decisions.

I had been interested in Indian music and I actually started studying Tableaus before I met him.

Everyone seems to be in a kind of accelerated time mode that is beyond their own control.

It's not what happens to you in life that matters; what matters is how you deal with it!

I was using tape loops for dancers and dance production. I had very funky primitive equipment, in fact technology wasn't very good no matter how much money you had.

We are either going to dissolve as a human race or we are going to break through into a new understanding of what it is to be a human being.

It is important that we are coming up on the millennium because what I am experiencing, just being one person out of billions, is the feeling of acceleration. I experience this through my contact with other people.

Essentially my contribution was to introduce repetition into Western music as the main ingredient without any melody over it, without anything just repeated patterns, musical patterns.