I don't think there's anything wrong with not knowing how to play an instrument, but the rise of the non-musical producer has done away with musicianship and focused attention purely on the song's hook.

At the risk of sounding pedestrian, I'll be completely honest: the first thing I do in the morning is check Google News, partially because it seems sort of random and unbiased and partially because I tend to stay in hotels that don't necessarily have the fastest Internet connections.

I can't think of any musician or producer who has influenced me more than Brian Eno. From when he was in Roxy Music, producing Devo, the Talking Heads and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

It's much easier to have a diversified career as an electronic musician than it is as a drummer. Nothing against drummers. If you're a drummer, you just wait around for people to ask you to play drums. But if you have your own studio and can make music, you have the ability to approach music a lot differently.

As a New Yorker you can't help but be proud of the fact that so much music and culture started here. Punk rock, jazz, hip-hop and house music started here, George Gershwin debuted 'Rhapsody in Blue' here; the Velvet Underground are from New York.

I've worked with all sorts of random people - everybody from Metallica to Britney Spears to Ozzy Osbourne to Michael Jackson to the Beastie Boys. I've got a really strange CV. It's interesting - I work with a lot of these disparate, different people to learn what it's like to work with random people.

Without David Bowie, popular music as we know it pretty much wouldn't exist.

I like noise. It's always puzzled me why one of the goals of contemporary recording is to get rid of noise and to eliminate any element of a performance.

I think a lot of self-importance is a product of fear. And fear, living in sort of an un-self-examined fear-based life, tends to lead to narcissism and self-importance.

I've had insomnia since I was a little kid and I never sleep well. Sometimes I sleep very badly and sometimes I sleep slightly badly. I get it especially when I'm on tour because you cross a lot of time zones, and I'm not very adaptable.

I like tea and yoga, but I don't do yoga.

If Nirvana had remained a small, underground punk rock band, Kurt Cobain would still be alive. And he'd probably be living in Seattle, getting kind of fat and balding, be relatively happy and producing records for other people.

Every single day the world seems like it is on the brink of falling apart. But then I look outside my window, and things look about the same as they did a week ago. It's almost a form of cognitive dissonance.

When I was growing up, albums were my closest friends, as sad as that may sound - Joy Division's 'Closer,' or Echo and the Bunnymen's 'Heaven Up Here'... I had a more intimate relationship with those records than I did with most of the people in my life.

I have no patience for anyone who thinks they've figured things out, no patience for people who think they're right at the expense of everyone else. The world is too connected and too complicated to conform to any of our rigid ideas of what it should be like.

The progressive movement needs more crazy and amoral/immoral right-wing politicians and pundits like Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich and Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity.

What fascinates me about addiction and obsessive behavior is that people would choose an altered state of consciousness that's toxic and ostensibly destroys most aspects of your normal life, because for a brief moment you feel okay.

Whenever I've had success, I never learn from it. Success usually breeds a degree of hubris. When you fail, that's when you learn.

Mainly I'm a vegan because I like animals, and I don't want to be involved in their suffering. Also, it's better for my health and for the environment.

There might be a lot of difference between Republicans and Democrats on key social issues like women's rights and health care. But when it comes to taking corporate cash, they're pretty much the same beast.

When I was nine years old, I started playing guitar, and I took classical guitar lessons and studied music theory. And played jazz for a while. And then when I was around fourteen years old, I discovered punk rock. And so I then tried to unlearn everything I had learned in classical music and jazz so I could play in punk rock bands.

I may be a lifelong 'downtowner,' but Central Park really is the most amazing and the most beautiful part of New York City.

A great song is a great song, whether it's on vinyl or CD or cassette or reel to reel or mp3. Then again, that might be an overly optimistic view, but I do think that great music will transcend the medium in which it is delivered.

It's heartbreaking that so many hundreds of millions of people around the world are desperate for the right to vote, but here in America people stay home on election day.