We never set out to be superstars.

Leaving Def Jam was kind of a blessing in disguise because we can make whatever record we want.

LL Cool J is very well known in Hollywood. He's an established commodity across several platforms, including motion pictures.

I'm really kind of a little bit romantic for the lost era. There's a lot of us that are - kind like James Murphy, same thing - we feel like it's this magic era that happened before us. And it wasn't even necessarily disco.

In the time we made 'To the 5 Boroughs,' there was a political seriousness because of what was happening in the world.

We're downtown New Yorkers and had very close proximity to the events of September 11th. Like everybody on the island of Manhattan, we were impacted by it in so many ways in terms of what we saw, what we felt, what our daily experience became in the wake of it.

When you get to a point where you're not beholden to a record company, then it's up to you to say, 'OK, enough knob-turning. We're done.'

The amazing thing about music is that however many thousands of records I've got now, I know that there are still thousands more that I haven't even begun to discover.

Mr. Philippe Zdar is a little bit like the uncle of the whole Daft Punk-Phoenix-Air thing in Paris and known for being in the group Cassius. It was interesting working with Philippe.

I grew up with a clock radio next to my bed.

Hopefully everybody in the audience thinks, 'That's cool. I could do that.' I don't like the thought that they say, 'I saw the Beastie Boys last night, and they're mega-stars.' I'm a lot happier when the kids who come backstage or to the hotel try to give us tapes of what they've done instead of just getting an autograph.

Thinking about the cold weather in England... Don't be afraid to rock the David Niven look.

L.A. is a town built upon segregated, individual fantasies.

We just have to be careful of our actions as world citizens.

That's the thing with all of us music geeks - music is the soundtrack to the things that happen in our lives, and there's music that's unique to that movie.

Every vote matters.

The bottom line with a lot of bands that funk is being applied to is that they don't really listen to funk and aren't versed in funk. Like, you know, Gordon Lightfoot.

The initial notion for 'Check Your Head' was just all three of us getting back to playing instruments.

All the music I listened to in high school that I loved and that moved me wasn't the same music other kids were listening to in school. I got into punk rock and new wave, then dub and hip-hop.

On 'Check Your Head' and 'Ill Communication,' most of the lyrics are much more, 'OK, you take that, and I'll say that' - they're split up.

Things change. I used to have a real resistance to it and hold on to things, but let things happen and go with it, and you will actually go through it, and it's a lot less stressful.

I kind of idolized older punk-rock and hip-hop bands, and I was, like, 15 when I started the Beastie Boys. And what business did we having doing that at that age?

Each time you present a tour, you're faced with these questions of, 'How do you want to present visual information? How do you want to take the music that we're making on stage and visualize that?'

When I first became aware of music, it was probably the same way a lot of people do - even more suburban or rural people - from my older brothers playing music.