Quotes from Max Richter

You can get away with a lot more in a film or television score. It is contextual.

'Spring One' probably has only four bars of Vivaldi in it, but it feels like it's all Vivaldi. It's odd. It's a bit like walking around a sculpture, you just sort of see it from a different angle.

If somebody says, 'Well, what are your favorite composers?' really, what they are saying is, 'What are your favorite composers apart from Bach?' Because obviously, Bach is your favorite composer if you are involved in music at all.

The thing that makes me want to write a piece of music is having something to talk about, you know? Something I want to get across. Because I'm a composer, music is my first language, and that's what I reach for when I want to convey something.

I'm obsessed with low end, its kind of my religion. In a way it has given me a chance to explore more than I have in any other project.

Often, especially young artists, you feel like you should be doing something. And I think that can be very destructive because creativity is about connecting with the stuff that's deep inside you and making something out of that.

We tend to think that when we're awake, we're on, and when we're sleeping our mind is off, but actually, we're not off. There's a lot going on!

'Sleep' is a project I've been thinking about for many years. It just seems like society has been moving more and more in a direction where we needed it. Our psychological space is being increasingly populated by data. And we expend an enormous amount of energy curating data.

I assumed no one would ever listen to my music, and for quite a lot of years, I was right.

In Germany, people feel like they own classical music, that it is somehow theirs. Over there, everyone still learns to play, and the great composers don't seem alien.

I came from a Conservatoire background where the idea of complexity was very much bound up with good music - good music was seen as complex and difficult to understand.

'Black Mirror' obviously has its own universe, with a very strong fingerprint and strong themes, and I was intrigued on reading. It's such a powerful piece of storytelling.

I lived in Scotland a long time, and I became aware of Mogwai really from the beginning. They seemed to be fusing hard music structure and sort of raw sonics. They're just very creative thinkers, musical thinkers.

That childhood passion and involvement and being really submerged in something, that's the kind of state I'm looking for all the time - and preserving that sense of magical possibility and wonder that children have. I think, for artists, if you can stay connected to that, then you are in a good place.

I just really try to stay focused on what the material is wanting to do. My basic assumption is that no one will ever listen to it anyway. It's fidelity to the material. That's my contract: It's me and the material. And if it connects with other people, I'm thrilled.

When you're working in cinema, you often have a very, very compressed schedule - very few weeks to just kind of go through that whole process of reflection and refining - and it has to be done.

It's a liminal thing, humming, And I'm always interested in liminal things.

When you make a piece, one of the interesting things is hearing what other people think about it.

It's true that many of the best-known composers were German or Austrian, but we should remember how good the music tradition is in Britain, too, because it has an informality and a fluidity that should really be celebrated.

Traditional methods for falling asleep work. Non-taxing, repetitive mental tasks have a lulling effect, and I built those patterns into 'Sleep'.

When I'm working with pictures, with images and storytelling, it's really about the sentiment and the emotional trajectory of the characters. That's really where the music lives, I think. That's what I'm focused on; that's what I respond to most strongly.

When we go to sleep ordinarily, we're doing something really private. It's kind of an intimate, private connection with our sort of physical humanity.

Sleeping and being asleep is one of my favorite activities. Really, what I wanted to do is provide a landscape or a musical place where people could fall asleep.

There's different ways to approach music for sleeping. Things like white noise are functional, like a lullaby. This is more like an inquiry, a question about how music and sleep fit together.