"I really like hip-hop and rap; that's my main influence. I really wanna be more of a hip-hop artist."

"If it weren't for acid, you might not have an IPod, and you definitely would not have some of the best music in your IPod."

"I think music is something that can, and should, be used to get you into different things because eventually what goes up must come down - we're not going to be the number one group in the world forever - so you have to have something else to fall back on."

"Aging will create the music of the coming century."

"Of all the music that reached farthest into heaven, it is the beating of a loving heart."

"If you look at an old piece of sheet music, there's all kinds of text on it, there are ads, there are proclamations of the greatest songs' success, there's artwork. So there is a tactile, physical experience of learning the song and the way it's notated."

"I can't tell you how many things I've worked on where I sat on it for a few years, and then somebody else did something very similar. Whether it's some weird vocal effect you hear on another record, or a drum beat, or even a song title, a subject matter, or a mixture of different kinds of music."

"Most of my early records were not cohesive at all, just collections of demos recorded in different years. 'Odelay' was the first time I actually got to go in the studio and record a piece of music in a continuous linear fashion, although that was written over a year."

"I enjoy the collaboration. I always envied people in bands who got to have that interaction. I've done so many albums where I've been in the studio for 14 hours a day for six months just trying to come up with things on my own. It's a nice change helping other people with their music and not being all about what I'm trying to do myself."

"Sometimes things in life take a few years to digest, and they find their way into the work later on. Sometimes I'm writing about things from eight years ago-they just took a long time to distill and come out in the appropriate way."

"I wish I had more confidence. I think that's probably my Achilles' heel. If I had more, I probably would have felt emboldened to make more interesting music earlier on, or really go for it in an artistic or songwriting sense."

"I think you have to keep a childlike quality to play music or make a record."

"What Spotify pays me is not even enough to pay the musicians playing with me or the people working on the discs. It's not working. Something is going to have to give."

"I'm just taking one step at a time. I could zigzag one way, but it's not usually on purpose."

"Sometimes I'll have an idea for a story or have a subject, and that will inspire lyrics, but most of the time, hopefully, they already exist somewhere else."

"Tonight the city is full of morgues, and all the toilets are overflowing. There's shopping malls coming out of the walls, as we walk out among the manure. That's why I pay no mind."

"There's something different that happens when you're writing a song for your own record that you know you're going to sing."

"Especially in music, you wonder, Okay, should I still be doing this? Like, are you overstaying your welcome at the party? But I don't know."

"I've never been able to relate to apathy. I've always been doing stuff, been in action, making music or working just to get by."

"There are a lot of people who really abused sampling and gave it a bad name, by just taking people's entire hit songs and rapping over them. It gave publishers license to get a little greedy."

"When my nephew was 3 and 4, he would say the most genius things. He said, You're hammer macho with FBI dogs. I thought it was just one of those great lines."

"It's really hard for me to commit, one way or the other. I was just always creating and seeing what came out."

"To me, 'rock star' conjures up something like a mystic: someone who sees himself as above other people, someone who has the key to the secret that people want to know."

"I think my whole generation's mission is to kill the cliche."