My idea of covers is that you should never cover a song and do it exactly like the artist because everyone's always going to compare it to the way the original artists did it, and they're just going to go, 'Oh I like the original better.'

I was watching TV once, and 'Jailhouse Rock' comes on, and I'm like, 'What is this?' I started watching it, and at the end, I thought, 'This is what I want to do. That's what I want to be. That's for me. That's it!'

I like Bill Murray a real lot. I like Andy Kaufman.

I don't think anyone in my family was funny.

Sometimes on a tour bus, we watch comedy when it's slow.

So many big magazines just dissed the whole punk thing as nothing, but really, it was a big thing. It really changed, and that's what we wanted to do - change the system.

I've seen a bunch of the 'Portlandia' episodes, and they're pretty hilarious.

I love giving the energy and getting the energy back. There is nothing like it.

Two hours onstage... that's the best part because it makes it all worth it.

The thing that has never changed is I do what I want to do. If I can't do what I want to do, I don't want to do it.

My attitude with covers is, make it your own or else leave it alone.

When I write, I write the drum beat. Though sometimes I write on piano or guitar.

I hate iPods.

CDs sound so much better than MP3s. I'm sure they'll come out with a better format someday.

I'm lucky that I can stay busy and people are interested in what I do. I have fantastic people that are into whatever I do, which is great. I try to keep myself happy and them happy.

I've always tried to expand what heavy or loud music was and where it can go and what it can do.

The most rebelliousness I see now is coming out of WikiLeaks and D.C. Leaks and BlackListed News.

All that pop that you see on the radio? It's just the worst crud I've ever heard in my life. It's designed to make money, and that's about it.

Pop music doesn't challenge anything.

It's pretty crazy the amount of people that have covered my songs.

It's funny I'm talking to 'Rolling Stone' right now, because back then, it was like, 'Punk rock? Put it back. It's just a flash in the pan.'

In some ways, it's better to be undervalued a little than overvalued a lot, just because it's still easy to believe our best days are ahead of us.

Folks are leaving Silicon Valley, mostly because they can't afford to stay.

From squalls, jibes, and other sudden calamities, I learned you don't always get to decide when you've got to make a decision.

Everybody has been told already that they're too shy, too aggressive, too emotional, too reserved. They know what their fatal flaw is. They know the one thing to do to get better. But they just don't commit to changing because they feel a little bit in love with it, a little bit in love with the way they've been.

What's most revolutionary about Uber is not the tool that consumers use but the fact that the only equipment needed by its drivers is their iPhone.

I think the company that has the clearest set of values is Amazon. That company knows what it is. It may be that it's not your cup of tea, but every single person at that company knows what the Amazon values are.

When we talk about a city's cost of living, we don't mean food, transportation, or clothing, which cost about the same everywhere. We mean housing.

We need to create technologies - and a culture of respect, and an updated legal doctrine, too - that allow creative folks to make money from their own efforts.

Funny money has always been the reason housing prices have risen too fast. First, it was liar loans and negative-amortizing mortgages, where the total amount you owed increased rather than decreased every month. We all know how that ended, with the global financial crisis of 2008.

To build a great business, you have to do something hard just to be able to withstand all the competition that will later come your way.

When I was trying to write a novel, I ran out of money, and I was delivering packages on a bicycle. And I finally connected with these guys who started a software company, and almost serendipitously fell into that. I felt like they were goofy guys and that I was a goofy guy.

Sometimes I wish I was less of a maniac; sometimes I wish I was more.

I am not excited about Bitcoin. I think it's an outrage that, in an era of global warming, there are racks of servers next to the Columbia River. I wish I could explain to the salmon that we've created a dam generating hydroelectric power so that we can generate a fake currency.

The really basic stuff that fuels 30-year job booms almost always comes from government research, stuff like biotech, the transistor, the Internet. The idea that private capital can handle the early spade work is a joke.

I think if I had gone to a private school and been coddled a little bit, I wouldn't be as tough as I am now.

I do think entrepreneurs need to be smart, but there's another scale I never evaluated myself on that is now the source of my deepest strength: Not how much brains I have, but how much love I have.

Most CEOs walk around the office like we own the place, without realizing that the place itself isn't worth owning: a business's value comes from the people who walk out the door every night, who have to decide each morning whether to walk back in. One of the simplest things you can do as a leader is honor their choice and appreciate their work.

You have to be sort of an emotional steward to really get a business to do something hard - to take people up the hill, to conquer the mountain, to sack the city. You have got to be a maniac.

Those in technology who can afford to stay in Silicon Valley all know it as one of the most beautiful places to live in the world, but a wariness has sunk in as folks from other walks of life are forced to leave: coffee shops are wall-to-wall with aspiring entrepreneurs, and restaurants buzz with talk of valuations and venture capital.

Short of a space-alien invasion or an Oklahoma tornado, there is almost no problem that a democracy can tackle in a year. But that isn't why we have a government. We have a government to solve the problems that greedy, short-sighted businessmen like me can't.

If we don't give the authors of music, film, literature, and journalism a way to control the distribution of their goods, the quality of all of these creative efforts will decline.

I think companies psych themselves out and say, 'Now that we're public, we've got to get all stuffy. We've got to be a certain way,' and the entrepreneurial spirit dies. What you got to keep alive is the intimacy, the energy, this crazed sense of purpose.

Once you become more like Madison Avenue, you become acutely sensitive to what's going to annoy your clients.

Steve Jobs knows how to hold his hand out, to build beautiful products and make people pay for them.

I'm an identical twin, and I felt that with my twin brother, we sort of formed this unassailable force, and it gave me the confidence to be different. Even if I was a goofball, my twin brother was a goofball with me, so I didn't have to worry about fitting in as much. I was able to march to my own drummer.

I think the corporate world is pretty starved for personality. The reason you have comic strips like 'Dilbert' and sitcoms like 'The Office' is that people just can't be genuine human beings in a corporate environment. So if you can really be your own self, even if it's a little bit different, I think people are really drawn to that.

At different points, I applied to graduate school. I got into medical school. I thought about being a writer. I thought about being an investment banker. I just didn't know what I wanted to do with myself. I think the thing that best suits me about being a C.E.O. is that you get to exercise many different talents and wear many different hats.

The tech industry's love for scrappy, accessible founders adds to the pressure. You're expected to lead by example, to roll up your sleeves, to know everything going on.

As a captain of industry, I would prefer more tax breaks to help people buy houses, but as a citizen, I realize someone has to pay.