In America idea of freedom isn’t actually about freedom. That’s about power. The point of an artist is to find out what are the flavors that I must work with. Finding one’s freedom is about surrendering to your helplessness.
Life is beautiful in all its colors, even the darker ones, they’re here for a reason.
Well, I don’t like the word ‘rock star,’ the two words, ‘rock star.’ Not even ’soft rock star. Not even limestone star. I don’t like those words.
There’s a reason why people who’ve had bad relationships with their parents listen to angry stuff.
There comes a point where it doesn’t matter how many zeroes are at the end of your bank account.
So I have probably 1,200 little bits of paper with notes, which when the Ambien really starts to kick in, don’t really make much sense. Say what you like about prescription drugs, but they do help when you’re sequencing a record.
The goal is to try and make the perfect song. Which of course will never happen.
I get more people approaching me about how good I was in ‘Napoleon Dynamite’ than being in Coldplay.
Celebrity culture has gone crazy, and I think the reason is that real news is just not bearable, and it also seems impossible to change anything.
Everyone asks me about being so worried or thinking about existence as if I’m the only person who can’t understand why a tree grows the way it does or why a person is in power when they’re not that great. These are questions everyone has.
Sometimes we have criticism that is very constructive.
You can never say you’re big – I don’t think you can ever take anything like that for granted.
It’s more egalitarian on the Internet – anyone can put anything up. But in terms of the money it takes to allow a band to get good, there’s less of it to invest.
Rihanna is mysterious and fascinating.
Even though the album is an endangered species, can we try and make a coherent and good one, even if it’s like making a horse and cart at a Nascar conference?
Those who are dead are not dead, they’re just living in my head.
The most extravagant thing I’ve ever bought is 95 tops all the same.
Being such a big band is never a problem but it can be distracting.
All the children of America, up to age seven or eight or nine or ten – they’re really great artists. So here we’ve got this amazing work that very few people pay any attention to, and it’s not valued by the culture.
The word mystical is an even worse word than spirituality – that artists take drugs, and then they add some crazy extra thing to what we all know is real. But our job as artists or as human beings is to investigate what we really think is real.
I don’t think you can be a mysterious rock star the same way you could in 1965 because there’s too much information. Everything you do is available all the time. So the only thing you can rely on is not being false.