Ad Rock from the Beastie Boys gave me a present: it's a boombox with a keyboard and a beatbox in it. You can't make that up.

Producing is always really hard, and you can never tell who's going to be easy to get along with and who's going to be difficult.

You can't be afraid to embarrass yourself sometimes.

I actually want to write a treatise in defence of pretension. I think the word 'pretension' has become like the word 'ironic' - just this catch-all term to distance people from interesting experiences and cultural engagement and possible embarrassment.

There are some people who are just plain great at making music. That's not who I am.

I suppose what happened is that I spent my whole life wanting to be cool but eventually came to recognise the mechanism of how coolness works. So it's not really that I don't want to be cool anymore - it's more like I've come to realise that coolness doesn't exist the way I once assumed.

You can buy $20,000 speakers, but put them in a room that's not right, and it sounds terrible. If you buy $20 speakers and put them in a room that's tuned right, it'll sound great.

I have an interest in everything, but I don't have an interest in starting new careers.

I don't see myself as necessarily a very creative person. I'm a technical guy.

One of my favorite photographers is Ruvan Wijesooriya, who takes most of the LCD photos. His work is incredibly colloquial and raw.

I'm generally a very optimistic guy.

I like clever lyrics, funny lyrics, dumb lyrics. I can never put my finger on what I like about them.

I don't write off silly pop people at all, because you never know where they're coming from.

For most of my life, making music has cost me money. So I learned to live very, very cheaply.

One of the things that I think is special about DJing is creating this atmosphere of collectiveness, as if to say, 'We're all in this together.'

When I do a remix, I try to think about what I don't have in my bag and create something to fill that gap.

Making people dance has another function that has nothing to do with art, and I mean that in the most positive way possible. It's like food - if you're not eating it, you're doing something wrong. If they're not dancing, something is wrong.

If there was a direct influence on a song, I never hid it.

I've always been a good imitator. I love music. But I'm just not that original.

I had friends who were jocks or whatever... Then, around 12 or 13, kids get cliquish and cruel, and that disgusted me. It seemed a reprehensible use of one's arbitrary social status. So I got really aggressive about it and became more of a weird kid.

I have a thing about inane lyrics - the world doesn't need them.

I'm basically a schlub.

LCD live was set up to be an argument about what's wrong with bands and why bands should be better. I always thought that we were so obviously not a great band, comically not a great band. I was not a great front man.

LCD is a band about a band writing music about writing music.