Jean-Michel Jarre

“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.”

“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.”

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

“I remember, for my fifth birthday, Chet Baker sat me on the upright piano, and he played just for me for a few minutes. I can still remember the pressure of the air on my chest. It was my first physical contact with sound.”

“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.”

“I studied classical music in the Conservatory of Paris.”

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

“When you have a young man, I mean, questioning the power in place for love of his country, not to say 'stop' but to say 'be careful about the abuse of technology,' I think it deserves to be promoted.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The paradox is that Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and all the tech giants are bigger fans of music than some of the executives working at major record companies.”

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

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

“Peace is neutral, and not very sexy.”

“I was obsessed with the idea that no two sounds on 'Oxygene' should ever be exactly the same. I wanted a heartbeat feel, something human.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“Electronic musicians are quite like writers or painters. They are quite isolated in their home studios. We often don't have that the opportunity to collaborate with that many people, like in rock or jazz.”