"Yeah, it's pretty hard not to be completely cynical these days."

"I have trouble imagining what I could do that's beyond the practicality of what I can do."

"We don't make music - it makes us."

"The assumption is that your personal life has to be a mess to create, but how much chaos can you allow in before it takes over?"

"With pop music, the format dictates the form to a big degree. Just think of the pop single. It has endured as a form even in the download age because bands conform to a strict format, and work, often very productively, within the parameters."

"I find rebellion packaged by a major corporation a little hard to take seriously."

"I subscribe to the myth that an artist's creativity comes from torment. Once that's fixed, what do you draw on?"

"One of the benefits of playing to small audiences in small clubs for a few years is that you're allowed to fail."

"From what I've heard, Paris did a little bit more prep work as far as making bike lanes and all of that stuff. They really did it properly, which New York is getting to little by little."

"I always think the everyday is more relevant than anything too grand because we all have to deal with it."

"In retrospect, I can see I couldn't talk to people face to face, so I got on stage and started screaming and squealing and twitching about. Ha! Like, that sure made sense!"

"I use a stream-of-consciousness approach; if you don't censor yourself, you end up with what you're most concerned about, but you haven't filtered it through your conscious mind. Then you craft it."

"I couldn't talk to people face to face, so I got on stage and started screaming and squealing and twitching."

"I'm not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments, but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down."

"Physical contact is a human necessity."

"When things get so absurd and so stupid and so ridiculous that you just can't bear it, you cannot help but turn everything into a joke."

"Sometimes I write stuff that strangely predicts what's going to happen in my life."

"You go to a festival, you know you're not going to play all new material at a festival. The audience is not there for that. I've made that mistake, but you find out pretty quickly."

"One knew in advance that life in New York would not be easy, but there were cheap rents in cold-water lofts without heat, and the excitement of being here made up for those hardships. I didn't move to New York to make a fortune."

"I cycled when I was at high school, then reconnected with bikes in New York in the late '70s. It was a good way of getting around the clubs and galleries of the Lower East Side and Soho."

"Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone - a memory."

"Frank Lloyd Wright... his things were beautiful but not very functional."

"I like to combine the dramatic emotional warmth of strings with the grooves and body business of drums and bass."

"The imminent demise of the large record companies as gatekeepers of the world's popular music is a good thing, for the most part."

"People are already finding ways to make their music and play it in front of people and have a life in music, I guess, and I think that's pretty much all you can ask."

"I don't think people are going to switch over to bikes because it's good for them or because it's politically correct. They're going to do it because it gets them from A to B faster."

"I don't think people are going to switch over to bikes because it's good for them or because it's politically correct. They're going to do it because it gets them from A to B faster."

"Yeah, anybody can go in with two turntables and a microphone or a home studio sampler and a little cassette deck or whatever and make records in their bedrooms."

"Well, Marx is having a comeback. I hear him mentioned a lot in terms of the global financial situation and the general sense of injustice out there. A lot of economic experts in America refer to him without actually using the M word, but he's around."

"As everything becomes digitized, there's the idea that things that can't be digitized become more valuable."

"I remember talking with Arcade Fire after their first record, when they were getting all kinds of offers from major labels, and I don't think I gave them any advice. They survived that whole onslaught pretty well anyway without me."

"In a certain way, it's the sound of the words, the inflection and the way the song is sung and the way it fits the melody and the way the syllables are on the tongue that has as much of the meaning as the actual, literal words."

"Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so."

"Some folks believe that hardship breeds artistic creativity. I don't buy it. One can put up with poverty for a while when one is young, but it will inevitably wear a person down."

"I couldn't take pictures of green rolling hills."

"I never listen to the radio unless I rent a car."

"I read the NY Times but I don't trust all of it."

"I try never to wear my own clothes, I pretend I'm someone else."

"I've been asking myself: 'Why put together these things - CDs, albums?' The answer I came up with is, well, sometimes it's artistically viable. It's not just a random collection of songs. Sometimes the songs have a common thread, even if it's not obvious or even conscious on the artists' part."

"Probably the reason it's a little hard to break away from the album format completely is, if you're getting a band together in the studio, it makes financial sense to do more than one song at a time. And it makes more sense, if you're going to all the effort of performing and doing whatever else, if there's a kind of bundle."

"So there's no guarantee if you like the music you will empathize with the culture and the people who made it. It doesn't necessarily happen. I think it can, but it doesn't necessarily happen. Which is kind of a shame."

"It's a fundamental, social attitude that the 1% supports symphonies and operas and doesn't support Johnny learning to program hip-hop beats. When I put it like that, it sounds like, 'Well, yeah,' but you start to think, 'Why not, though?' What makes one more valuable than another?"

"I came to New York to be a fine artist - that was my ambition."

"Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past?"

"There's more good music being made now than ever before."

"It seems almost backwards to me that my music seems the more emotional outlet, and the art stuff seems more about ideas."

"We live in ugly times."

"Having unlimited choices can paralyze you creatively."

"People hear about stuff from their friends or a magazine or a newspaper."

"I've got "nothing "to say most of the time."