Quotes from Ryuichi Sakamoto

I had never really liked the music by Gabriel Faure, but just by chance, listening to some pieces by him, I got very interested. So I listened to almost everything. All the pieces written by him. I was digging deeper and deeper. I'm not sure I still like his music or not, but it's interesting.

I'm really bad writing the chase scenes or fighting scenes. I'm much better for writing, like, a more melancholic or tragic music.

It's a very intimate, closed universe, doing my own music. It's just me, basically. I have to inspire myself; I have to do everything by myself.

I have to follow my instinct and intuition and curiosity.

Japan used to be an animistic society before Shinto imperialism was established. But most of us still have an animistic sense.

I'm not the ambassador of Japan or Japanese culture.

Japanese people can feel some attachment in what they are making, whether it is a car or a TV or a computer.

I'm just delighted to be living, to be able to have a simple conversation, to feel a ray of sunlight on my skin and listen to the breeze move through the leaves of a tree.

When I imagine some music in my mind, almost automatically, I imagine the piano keys.

Playing in London in 1979 was exciting: it was at the start of new wave, the transition period after punk, and there were a lot of radical, fashionable young people on the streets and in the venues.

I'm a terrible drummer; I almost cannot play the guitar nor sax nor trumpet.

In Japan, there has always been a small number of musicians who have been outspoken on social issues, but they tend to be dismissed as radical.

When we went to see the first rough cuts of 'Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence,' I fell to the floor because my acting was so bad. I wrote music to compensate for my bad acting.

I went to see one of those pianos drowned in tsunami water near Fukushima and recorded it. Of course, it was totally out of tune, but I thought it was beautiful. I thought, 'Nature tuned it.'

Music has become something different from the past, when it was one hundred per cent live. Throughout the twentieth century, it was recorded, and the medium adjusted.

The world is full of sounds. We just don't usually hear them as music.

You can use existing music in a film, but creating a soundtrack is very different. One note can be enough.

Just recently, I thought about how maybe I should have kept using the synthesisers more after 'Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence'; then, I would have been a more unique soundtrack composer than I am now. It could have been my signature. But then, probably, Bertolucci would not have offered me to compose for his films.

I want to capture the mood I have now, post-cancer, in my music.

I have a lot of sketches and ideas, but when you don't use them, they get stale.

I like to write film music that stands on its own.

I was working with the computer at university and playing jazz in the daytime, buying west-coast psychedelic and early Kraftwerk records in the afternoon, and playing folk at night. I was quite busy!

It's all very well to say this or that on Twitter and Facebook, but ultimately, if you are a musician, it is going to carry more weight if you make your statements through your craft.

The majority of the people think that noise is not music. I want to accept noise and even errors and glitches. I enjoy them.