Top 97 Quotes & Sayings by Jean-Michel Jarre

With the violin, for example, one understands culturally that the sound comes from the instrument that can be seen. With electronic music, it is not the same at all. That's why it seemed so important to me, from the beginning of my career, to invent a grammar, a visual vocabulary adapted to electronic music.

We all think we are connected to the world now, but we are not talking to our neighbours any more.

As a musician, I have always strived for my albums and live performance to render a sound as close as possible to perfection.

I was recently realizing that I've probably spent 80 percent of my life in studios! It's very difficult to do that and still have a private life; it's very difficult to do anything else.

Sometimes, you try something, and it works in terms of success. That doesn't mean you like what is a hit. Sometimes you like the most obscure song on your album.

I think that in any language when you have a real relationship, and there is love and respect between people, infidelity is always something difficult to accept - whether you are Chinese, British, French. I think that is a universal concept... or problem.

If music is to continue to support the livelihoods of artists, it cannot be taken without the permission of artists.

It's sometimes better to have a father figure to rebel against than nothing, than just a black hole or an absence.

People are rejecting the power of the elite, but individuals such as Snowden are doing so in a positive way, trying to change things for the better. He is a very intelligent man and obviously interested in electronic music.

Emotions are the basics of any art form!

I don't necessarily like anniversaries that much.

When I heard Edward Snowden's story, it reminded me of my mother in a strange way. She was in the French resistance from early on, 1941. At that time, the Resistance were considered troublemakers - even traitors - in France.

People don't realize enough how important and influentical John Carpenter has been in electronic music. He did his soundtracks by himself, using mostly electronic and analog synthesizers. He's a cult figure with DJs these days for good reasons.

I would say to anyone starting out that if their priority in life is happiness, then don't be a musician.

I have always been of the opinion that when those in power are promoting actions and ideals that risk harming or impeding us, people should stand up to this.

I was always interested in mixing experimentation with pop music, and Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream - we were all doing it at the same time, just very isolated from each other, all in our different cellars, in different worlds, without the Internet - underground in every sense.

Some collaborators might join forces in certain cities or special concerts. I'm excited to share the stage with some prestigious people that I love and respect.

Suddenly, we are putting ourselves as the next dinosaurs. It's rather dark; we have narrowed our dreams. It is time to restore our visions. And so it's not a nostalgic idea; it is based with this unconscious need to restore a kind of dynamic for tomorrow.

The major rock instruments and classical instruments were designed for performance, for sharing the music with an audience, and then later people put microphones on them and recorded them. But for electronic music, the opposite was true - they're designed in laboratories, and later, we tried to put them on stage.

To me, the original VCS3 synthesizer is like a Stradivarius.

Music is the backbone of my shows.

Think about when you listen to a song on the radio. You are not paying for it; it's not illegal to do it, because the rights have been paid for on top, beforehand, by the radio station, by the network. We have to find exactly the same kind of system with the Internet.

My father and I never really achieved a real relationship. We probably saw each other 20 or 25 times in our lifetime.

My mother, who was in the Resistance in the Second World War, passed away at 96, and it was like she was 60. I almost have to apologise for my genes.

One of the first things I created was music for the Paris opera's ballet troupe. That was the first time that electronic music was played at the opera. I really like the relationship between the music and the choreography.

Back in the Seventies, we had a romantic, poetic vision of the future, like it was in the movie '2001: A Space Odyssey.' It felt as if everything was still ahead of us.

When I compose an album, I don't think about how to adapt it on stage.

I studied classical music in the Conservatory of Paris.

For me, electronic music is the classical music of the 21st century.

If you get rid of music, images, videos, words and literature from the smartphone, you just have a simple phone that would be worth $50.

When I was at the Group for Musical Research, with this idea of discovering electronic music, I quickly realized that that it was a very interesting and exciting approach to music, but I also saw that it was very intellectual and quite dogmatic.

I feel very privileged to have played China, and the pyramids, all these fantastic places, but it created a kind of smoke curtain between the audience and me as a musician.

Even if we artists are all very privileged, there's a constant frustration about how to do more or better, and never being satisfied.

Saying that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say.

I thought we had opposite visions of electronic music. Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk had a very robotic, mechanical approach. I had a more impressionist vision - a Ravel/Debussy approach.

Generation after generation, there is this never-ending, contemptuous, condescending attitude to the next generation or the next way of thinking: music, art, politics, whatever. And I have never been like that.

I am not someone who is afraid; I am someone who reasons.

When I did the first 'Oxygene' in the vinyl days, I had a structure in mind divided in 2 parts fitting the A&B sides of an album.

I always dreamed, when I started writing music, to find a way of immersing yourself in it.

I did the first 'Oxygene' on an 8 tracks tape recorder with very few instruments, with no other choice than being minimalist.

Pursuing music eats into your life to the point where there is no space left for anything else. You are lucky if you find a partner who is able to understand that, but even then, they will only understand it for a while, and then things get - you know, difficult.

Music, photography, media, film - it's all going to be free on the Internet. We have to accept it.

I wanted to create a bridge between experimental music and pop.

The difference between noise and music is in what the musician does with the sounds.

For me, electronic music is like cooking: it's a sensual organic activity where you can mix ingredients.

My first synthesizer was the VCS3. I got it in Bristol in the late Sixties, long before Pink Floyd used them. I had to sell an acoustic guitar and an old reel-to-reel tape recorder to raise the money. You can do fantastic things with modern computers, but you cannot use them in the same intuitive, spontaneous way you can a VCS3.

What may not have value to you today may have value to an entire population, entire people, an entire way of life tomorrow. And if you don't stand up for it, then who will?

In a lifetime, you can say, yes, you have instances of pleasure, of happiness, you like some of your work, but your work is the entire story, and if you are not satisfied with a few moments of a few parts of that story, you would like to be able to adjust that.

CDs are not as good as vinyl, and you buy one in the supermarket along with the yoghurt.

Our senses have changed, even though our emotions have not.

The whole 'Electronica' project is about the ambiguous relationship we have with technology: on the one side, we have the world in our pocket; on the other, we are spied on constantly.

Most of the time, when you are in the studio, you are revealing yourself; you're a bit naked. You can express your weaknesses, your awkward way of approaching sound. Sharing these intimate moments is like inviting somebody into your private room.

Governments can help support European music by promoting public awareness that when people take music that doesn't belong to them, they undermine the future of those very artists whose work they enjoy.

Technology does not always rhyme with perfection and reliability. Far from it in reality!

People who do music do it because it is all they can do. And that's me, I suppose. I can do nothing else.

Technology is neutral, but it all depends on the way we use it.

We have lost our vision for the future. Before, we say, 'Nothing will be the same. Cars will fly, and we go to the end of the universe.' We have this kind of naive but exciting idea of the future. Now, the vision has been reduced to ways to select our garbage and how to survive global warming.

From the outside, being an artist seems like a dream life, but there are much darker aspects to it.

When you think after 25 years of Mao, Chinese people had no idea about western music or even western culture. They had no idea about James Dean or the Beatles or Charlie Chaplin, modern music or modern cinema.

Snowden has demonstrated true love for his country. He has done something to improve the lives of people.