I need weird breakages to happen for music to feel true to life, and I think that also applies to good film scores.

When you're working in service to a big project, there's always the question of, 'Is there total freedom to do what I think is right artistically, or is this a job?' It's okay for things to be a job. I'm perfectly comfortable working. I don't need to sit around and quench whatever personal artistic thirst I have at all times.

I love thinking of music of this way to access some kind of illogical realm filled with all kinds of aberrations and weird stuff. It's not implicit in music to have a story, so it creates this incredible potential for vague stories.

I was always screwing around with music, but I really wanted to go to film school when I was in high school. I guess what happened was that I didn't get into Tisch, that's what happened. I got deferred. And I went to Hampsire and ended up making music like everybody else there.

I don't think I could make a good film, but I could definitely score a good film.

I realize that I've had Ian Van Dahl: 'Castles in the Sky,' the Ibiza jam, periodically stuck in my head for years, like years of my life. Every now and then 'Castles in the Sky' will just happen. Maybe that's some sort of indication that it's actually my favorite song of all time.

I'm basically like a dad; I've always been a dad.

That's a problem I have a lot of the time with humor in music, where it just kind of stops at the obvious level of: 'Hey, isn't it something that's in bad taste?'

There would not be Skaters or Emeralds or any of these bands if it weren't for Double Leopards.

My friend and I were in a band together and we used to always refer it it as 'floor-core,' meaning that we would sit on the floor and play stuff.

It's not like I actually understand the properties of sound.

Games is like hardwired plumbing in the house of pop. It's not pop itself, its sort of like the behind-the-scenes arteries and capillaries of pop music.

Games isn't really pop music, and neither is OPN. Both are part of the same ecosystem and both deal with exploring the undercurrents of pop music.

Generally my response to seeing something really symmetrical and perfect is... it's the scene with Jack Nicholson's Joker in the first 'Batman,' the museum scene. Him just spray-painting the Mona Lisa, and whatever, with his goons.

The thing that I've always been a little bit jealous of is a complete, a total giving to one form, like a genre, and just a mastery of it. My thing is very different. It's a complete embrace of something, but I've never been able to say, 'I believe in this.' The only thing I believe in is that I'm in this perpetual state of disbelief.

All my collaborators unilaterally said that I need to just stay on one idea for longer. And of course I understand that. I like to switch gears a lot, and I like this kind of sloppy attitude.

Yeah it would be really cool to disappear. Like Jack Nicholson in 'The Passenger.' Isn't that the final frontier? Being able to erase everything everyone knows about you and just be a stranger has become extremely seductive.

The promotional cycle's this staging area for failure. I hate it! Why bother when everyone's either gonna steal the album or copy it?

I just like cliches. I like tvtropes.com. It's pretty much my bible.

I was never totally sold on this idea that I'm just a musician. I wanted to be the Tim Burton of music.

It's stupid and embarrassing that you can describe something to one person and not to another. Until I've solved that problem I'm not going to feel like I've achieved too much.

I had it calcified inside me that that was the ultimate state of composing. Being Brian Wilson. Being simultaneously a genius and sort of lost at sea - not really knowing what you're doing but reaching for the stars.

We had a band called the Grainers. In our 12-year-old minds, this was like a double entendre for like being annoying and being a delicious donut. I got kicked out of the band for playing bass incorrectly. Like, I was playing it like a guitar. I was just so like twee and British, even as like the little 12-year-old boy.

I'm like soft Ray Manzarek. I think of the keyboard as almost like a bass or a lead.

I've made my most horrible inhuman tendencies work for me.

I need my 'art work' or 'entertainment work' or whatever to have empathy for or connection to the way I experience the world as a person.

I have a hard time making a linear-idea song, because that's not the way my thoughts work.

I'm down for indefinitely chilling as long as I'm not self-aware during it. That seems like it could be torture on some level but a lot of people pray for that so who knows.

I definitely strive towards something I think of as a hallucination of music. That's always been the OPN vibe. I think of it as mostly a felt thing, and a koan of feeling that is shared between me and OPN fans. We know what it is when it gets there.

To me, 'Garden of Delete' is a way of describing the idea that good things can bloom out of a negative situation. All the traumatic experiences I had during puberty, ugly memories and ugly thoughts in general can yield something good, like a record or whatever.

John Martin was a great, complex folk singer, and later on, his music became more and more melancholic as he went through a separation with his wife.

Science fiction to me is the ultimate art form, because it speculates on bodies and worlds that don't exist.

Film scores are complicated puzzles that you need to figure out and solve very quickly, or else you're basically fired. You're hired to enhance the film and you only have a couple tries to prove that you are capable of that task. I can keep trying to enhance my album ad infinitum.

I think I'm a person that's very pessimistic about, like I'm not a luddite but I don't think we need to crack the code of technology and bring forth a future techno utopia.

I'm predisposed to believe we live in a complicated, enmeshed reality. There's no authentic or organic.

I'm not much of a crier, actually. You know, I tend to cry and get sappy on planes.

I am not an egghead in the least.

I basically am always chasing this super enhanced stimulation from music.

You look at somebody like Thurston Moore. Is he a noise dude? A punky dude? Is he a free jazz dude? He's a stimulation chaser, and I relate to that.

Before puberty, it seems like I was more or less smiling a lot. I was really outgoing and wanted to have a happy life.

I was a failed grunge kid who was too nerdy to totally get down with rock.

I was perpetually this B-minus kid vacillating between eagerness and depression. I wasn't a bad kid, and I definitely wasn't aggressive, but I was a sad kid.

I knew my whole life that I had to make ends meet or I would be ashamed of myself. I had a lot of pressure from my parents. So that's where my vision comes from. It's not to be a great artist, it's always to be like, 'Dad, look, I didn't let you down.'

Music that is considered minimalism - or post-minimalism music in general - things of that nature or that come from that tradition, or even drone, or non-western music, have a more subtle and more open-ended verticality to them that allows for your own mind and body to be involved.

The way I think about things or hear things in my head is actually much closer to acoustic instruments. I don't have weird synthesized fantasy of music in my head.

Especially in repetitive music, to make a long piece of music you have to be extremely skilled in your sleight of hand. Just to make long form music it's very difficult and you really have to consider what you're putting someone through.

I loved Alva Noto's 'Xerrox, Vol. 3' a lot. It might be my favorite of his records. I must admit, I was bummed to see him say he was surprised by how emotional the record came out, as if he was ashamed. But there's something perfect about that.

I've lost so many gigs composing commercial or television music because I can't repress my inclination to work against conventions.

Nothing's ever easy about composing for other people's projects, but I like it. I've been lucky to have worked with adventurous directors who trust me.

Oneohtrix Point Never is total freedom to do what I think is right.