Sylvian: "Creating a decent pop song is a challenge - and occasionally, once in every decade - it's kind of fun to do that."

Sylvian: "Nothing to me is more important to me than the principle of the work, the function of the work in society. When it goes out into society, it must have a job to do."

Sylvian: "We can transform ourselves. In transforming ourselfes, we can transform the world."

Sylvian: "So much of what we created with Japan was built upon artifice. With that song I'd felt I'd had the breakthrough I was looking for. I'd touched upon something true to myself and expressed it in a way that didn't leave me feeling overly vulnerable. In the coming years I'd forget about all notions of vulnerability, opening up the material to a greater emotional intensity. I knew that I had to find my own voice, both figuratively and literally."

Sylvian: "During the lifetime of Japan I became very neurotic, very paranoid."

Sylvian: "The details are what always interested me. And so I just began to spend more and more time on those details, until they came to the forefront of the material-textures and atmospherics. I began to elaborate on those more and more and push the rhythmic element a little bit further back."

Sylvian: "I like to explore a lot of textural, arrangement aspects in the studio."

Sylvian: "I think nowadays it doesn't really matter where we are physically located. We create our own culture around us to a large extent, whether it's what we're listening to, what we're watching, what we're reading - it can have very little to do with one's immediate cultural environment. We are in a global culture in that respect."

Sylvian: "I'm obsessed with books."

Sylvian: "People are afraid to ask musicians to be involved in projects because they anticipate being turned down. Young artists hesitate before contacting me. People in my position don't get approached often enough."

Sylvian: "Sometimes a little compromise isn't a bad thing. You don't need to be precious about it."

Sylvian: "The public so often want to freeze the artist in a moment in time when they were at their peak, and they want the artist to revisit it over and over again as if it was something authentic."