Peter Gabriel Quotes

Art suggests stuff that is traded like money, that is kept in galleries and that belongs to the elite, whereas experience is something that everybody has in the course of living.

I think it is the weak and the young and the minorities that you need to look after to get a healthy creative environment – to get a lot of choices, a lot of different styles of music, a lot experimental stuff that everyone else feeds off.

I think one of the things about writing in the studio is that the song hasn’t matured, if you like, so quite often the vocals are early attempts. Whereas once you’ve taken it out on the road a bit, you learn more about a song.

I really wanted the first record to be different from what I’d done with Genesis, so we were trying to do things in different styles.

I think that you get the mood of a song stronger if you get it right that way. On the other hand, you put some songs out live and they don’t catch flight. They just flop. It is hard to tell until they are out there.

As many an architect will tell you, human behavior changes according to the environment.

Sometimes a creative environment affects what happens within it.

I think another thing is that we don’t really want exclusivity. We accept that it is in the artist‘s interest to be on sale in every place where they sell music.

It took me three albums to get the confidence and to find out what I could do that made me different from other people. And the first record, really, was a process of trying.

I didn’t leave the band to go solo so much as to stop feeling like a production item.

There’s a Slow Food movement. I think I’m part of the Slow Music movement.

A record for us that sells 50,000 is a good record, and 100,000 is a serious hit.

Studios always seem to be in basements without natural light and with black everything.

What intrigues me is that you get a good bunch of musicians together, and interesting things will happen.

I’m trying to enlarge what I do with my voice, not through technique but just through the sounds. I think we all make noises, and particularly when we get involved or emotional about something, the colors and the tones of those noises change.

The American record company Geffen got so fed up with me that they said they weren’t going to release my fourth record unless I gave it some title. So it was called ‘Security’ in America, and it had no title everywhere else in the world.

Snowden‘s revelations shocked the world and made it very clear why we need to have some way to look over those who look over us. With increasing terrorist attacks, security is critical, but not without any accountability or oversight.

When I left Genesis, I just wanted to be out of the music business. I felt like I was just in the machinery. We knew what we were going to be doing in 18 months or two years ahead. I just did not enjoy that.

You have independent films and independent music, but you don’t have independent theme parks – I think, in a way, Burning Man is as close, probably, as you get.

As we become so visible in the digital world and leave an endless trail of data behind us, exactly who has our data and what they do with it becomes increasingly important.

The industry does have some influence on who gets other awards. With the Mercury Prize, they don’t. Jon comes from the business, but his heart is still very much in the music. Currently, we have about 12 major names that have said they want to be a part of MUDDA.

If we grab technology and adapt it and make it work for us, it will work in one way, whereas if we just leave it, it will stay in the hands of big corporations and governments, who have other agendas.

I was very happy to learn Oliver Stone had decided to make a film about Edward Snowden and believe this is a powerful and inspiring film.

I think the rhythm is like the spine of the piece. If you change that, then the body that forms around it is changed as well.

Italian food is my favorite food. It’s the most sophisticated eating system.