If you look at someone like Joe Strummer or John Lennon, when you heard their music you knew that they wrote it and they cared about it.

It's enshrined in our Constitution that an individual has a right to release information and disseminate information that makes the powers that be uncomfortable.

You can sit down with Reason or Ableton and literally in a couple of hours make a very good-sounding record. But then a lot of people become contented with that, rather than pushing themselves to making something that sounds great.

I've made records that everyone has hated and I've loved, and made records that everyone has loved and I've deemed, at best, mediocre.

In the course of my life, I've made some happy songs but it's the more sort of like pathos-laden, emotional, melancholic music that either I make or that other people make that really resonates with me.

Music is just air moving around.

One of the nice things about licensing music to movies or advertisements is you can reach a lot of people who normally wouldn't hear music.

Musically, New York is a big influence on me. Walk down the street for five minutes and you'll hear homeless punk rockers, people playing Caribbean music and reggae, sacred Islamic music and Latino music, so many different types of music.

Growing up in Connecticut, all the Colonial houses looked alike. In Los Angeles, the diversity is so extreme, it's baffling.

More often than not, whenever gossip has been written about me, the gossip is more interesting than the reality. I know some public figures hate gossip, but personally I like it because it makes my life sound more glamorous and interesting than it really is.

The average life expectancy of a celebrity is 20 years less than someone working in a coal mine.

New York is such a competitive place; it tears people apart. People come here and, if they can't make it in the first month, they get torn apart and they have to go back to where they came from. I don't think that's terribly healthy.

No one drives in Manhattan - in fact, many of the folks who live in Manhattan don't even have driving licenses!

When playing big festivals, I tend to play big, over the top techno tracks, like hands in the air songs that make sense being played in front of 30,000 people. I steer away from subtlety in the interests of big bombastic dance music.

People assume that somehow fame and wealth will keep mortality at bay.

One of the reasons why fundamentalists are so aggressive in trying to promote fundamentalism is because deep down they know it's arbitrary. If you're comfortable with your belief you don't need to convince other people to agree with you.

Have I dated a supermodel? Of course not. I'd look ridiculous.

Somehow, magically, I've become an electronic musician, and I have a recording studio that looks like the bridge of the Enterprise.

There is nothing terribly wrong with my face, even if some of its parts aren't very inspiring.

For years, my mom dated a man who was really active in the Baptist church in the town next to the town I grew up in, and so he used to drag me to these Baptist church services that lasted forever. I remember that I didn't like the church services, but I really liked the music.

There are a lot of public figures who, before they take a stand on a issue, they talk about it with their publicist and they figure out how it's going to affect record sales. Life is really too short to worry about that sort of thing.

For better or worse, I'm interested in just about everything: every different type of music I can imagine. I can never see a reason to choose just one type of music at the exclusion of everything else. Different types of music are capable of being rewarding in different kinds of ways.

A lot of people do talk about the demise of the album, but I still believe that if an artist tries hard to make a great album, people will buy it and listen to it as an album, rather than just a collection of random songs.

The only sort of descriptive adjective or catch phrase for my music would be 'eclectic.'

Being a vegan is pretty easy these days, as almost every town and city has health food stores and vegetarian-friendly restaurants.

I wish I could sing. I don't technically have a terrible voice, but it's certainly not as good as most of my friends. Whenever I hear myself on a record, it just reminds me I'm not a very good singer.

For me, New York still ranks as the most beautiful and the most interesting city in the world. It is also the most varied in terms of the things it has to offer.

I'm a terrible cook, so I usually eat out with friends.

I feel like once the song is done, you put it out there and if people want to do bizarre remixes, if people want to make strange videos, great. You know, like chaos theory applied to the music business.

I don't sleep very well when I travel. And as a result, I tend to be awake in cities when everyone else is asleep.

'Arbitrary' and 'odd' are the words which best describe the pattern of my career. I'm perpetually baffled by the whole thing.

If you make a record, you should ask yourself, 'Did it make someone cry, in a good way, not a bad way?' There should almost be subjective emotional criteria for evaluating work, instead of just profitability.

A part of me wants to sort of try and sound cool and feed this myth that I'm some sort of glamorous lothario, but I was raised by women - my mother and her mother and my aunts - and as a result, most of my friends have always been women.

I thought that my life would be spent working in a bookstore, teaching community college, and making music in my spare time that no one would be willing to listen to.

It's a very strange phenomenon being hated by people you've never met. Some journalists just seem to hate me and everything I do, and it's disconcerting because I've never met this person.

Traffic terrifies me.

I was never encouraged to believe anything. I was brought up in a profoundly agnostic or pantheistic community.

But on a utilitarian level, I realize that to try to accomplish the greatest good for the greatest number of people, sometimes we have to become salesmen for what we believe, and part of being a salesman is being effective.

You could spend every waking moment online and still only experience one-trillionth of what's out there. I find that a little overwhelming.

I'd much rather go to a Banksy art show than a Moby art show. My art is painfully naive.

As people continue to do more and buy more over the Internet, continue to meet people over the Internet, connection speeds are going to get faster, and the Internet is just going to become an even more integral part of people's lives.

I find myself for whatever reason unable to live in the apartment I renovate and have to sell.

Punishing people for listening to music is exactly the wrong way to protect the music business.

I don't have children, but I imagine if parents are really pushed on the subject, they probably have favorite children.

I buy things with the best of intention of living in them and then life intercedes.

I live in New York and I love hanging out in gay clubs, and a lot of my friends are gay. But, for better or for worse, I'm not gay.

We do all, myself included, we tend to hold ourselves to pretty low standards. But when it comes to judging public figures or politicians or people we've never met, we tend to hold people to very high standards, and, if we held ourselves to those standards, we'd always fall short.

Shaving your head is acceptable. It's when you start wearing toupees and brushing your hair over that things go wrong.

I'm like a monk with a taste for hookers.

When I was in my twenties, I thought I was bulletproof.