Derek Bailey to Ben Watson, a music critic and biographer:

Bailey said of recorded music ‘I have very little interest in the end product. My preoccupation is with the nuts and bolts … what it is that makes this stuff work and how sometimes it doesn’t work … it’s a bit like jigsaw puzzles. Emptied out of the box, there’s a heap of pieces, all shapes, sizes and colours, in themselves attractive and could add up to anything – intriguing. Figuring out how to put them together can be interesting, but what you finish up with as often as not is a picture of unsurpassed banality. Music’s like that’.

As quoted in an essay on Bailey for Frieze by Dan Fox.  Click through for the full article.