My uncle is from Argentina, so I grew up hearing Spanish. My Spanish isn't very good, but my pronunciation isn't terrible.
— Moby
I don't think there's anything wrong with not knowing how to play an instrument, but the rise of the non-musical producer has done away with musicianship and focused attention purely on the song's hook.
It seems so antithetical to the teachings of Christ to proclaim your faith in public. I mean, of course you're not supposed to hide your light under a bushel.
It's sometimes too easy to point fingers when circumstances dramatically go awry, but as an addict, I'm ultimately responsible for my own decisions, no matter how benign or tragic the consequences.
Traffic terrifies me.
Music is just air moving around.
I remember New York in the '80s as a place with vacant lots that would eventually give over to nature. Weeds would grow up, squirrels would move in. That entropy is gone now. It's too expensive to let a vacant lot go natural.
I walk out my front door in New York and I'm out on the street and there are people everywhere. L.A. is so much more spread out, so it's really easy in L.A. to have a little more isolation and to just not see as many people.
People love their favorite records. And I aspire to make a record someone might be able to love in that way.
I think that Eminem is very talented and remarkably bright, and I actually do like a lot of his music.
The good thing about not being drop-dead gorgeous is that as time passes, I don't have much to worry about. I have friends who are actors and every day they look in the mirror with trepidation.
The average life expectancy of a celebrity is 20 years less than someone working in a coal mine.
Being a vegan is pretty easy these days, as almost every town and city has health food stores and vegetarian-friendly restaurants.
Scotland is one of my favourite places to perform: it's really something special. Scottish audiences are just so enthusiastic; their approach to dance music just feels similar to my own somehow.
If you care about women's rights, you can't not vote.
As music became more profitable in the 1990s, it seemed like it attracted a lot of people who were just interested in the financial aspect of it, which is depressing.
Most artists, you know, you spend their entire lives learning how to play music and write songs, and they don't really know how the music business works.
I made a record in 1996 called 'Animal Rights' that was a very difficult, very dark punk-rock record. Of all the records I've made, it's my favorite one. It's also the one that got the worst reviews and sold the worst.
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.
You could spend every waking moment online and still only experience one-trillionth of what's out there. I find that a little overwhelming.
When I was in my twenties, I thought I was bulletproof.
The good thing about working alone is I get a lot done and I can experiment more. The bad thing is I miss out on the gregarious, social way that most musicians work.
I always feel kind of absurd and presumptuous presenting a speech.
Many of my friends back in New York and elsewhere have a glib or dismissive attitude toward Los Angeles. It's a place of strip malls and traffic and not much else, in their opinion.
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.
When I was growing up, albums were my closest friends, as sad as that may sound - Joy Division's 'Closer,' or Echo and the Bunnymen's 'Heaven Up Here'... I had a more intimate relationship with those records than I did with most of the people in my life.
When I went to university, I was a philosophy major, but because I'm not very bright I chose to study philosophy at a performing arts school, maybe because the philosophy program there wasn't too rigorous or challenging.
Shaving your head is acceptable. It's when you start wearing toupees and brushing your hair over that things go wrong.
I love it when celebrities fall apart.
Mainly I'm a vegan because I like animals, and I don't want to be involved in their suffering. Also, it's better for my health and for the environment.
It's heartbreaking that so many hundreds of millions of people around the world are desperate for the right to vote, but here in America people stay home on election day.
There might be a lot of difference between Republicans and Democrats on key social issues like women's rights and health care. But when it comes to taking corporate cash, they're pretty much the same beast.
There are a lot of musicians who are still desperately trying to pretend that it's 1998 and by having a huge marketing campaign, they somehow believe that they can sell 10 million records. That's delusional. No one sells 10 million records. The days of musicians getting rich off of selling records are done.
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.
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.
Every single day the world seems like it is on the brink of falling apart. But then I look outside my window, and things look about the same as they did a week ago. It's almost a form of cognitive dissonance.
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.
There's a fairly extensive network of musicians on tour who are all trying to stay sober, and we generally reach out to each other and offer support when and where we can.
I'd much rather go out and have music randomly presented to me by different DJs than stay home and discover it on my own.
What fascinates me about addiction and obsessive behavior is that people would choose an altered state of consciousness that's toxic and ostensibly destroys most aspects of your normal life, because for a brief moment you feel okay.
Growing up in Connecticut, all the Colonial houses looked alike. In Los Angeles, the diversity is so extreme, it's baffling.
Personally I find the democratic chaos of the Internet fascinating, and for the most part really benign.
For me to speak out against the war in Iraq, you know - most of my fans are lefties anyway, so I don't really get much flack for it.
I love the fact that no one's ever bought my record because they were enamoured of the way I look. Maybe one person. There must be someone out there with compromised taste.
There is nothing terribly wrong with my face, even if some of its parts aren't very inspiring.
I'm a terrible cook, so I usually eat out with friends.
I don't know many artists who are happy with themselves all of the time.
If someone is cynical and doesn't vote and ends up with a crummy job in a crummy country with a decimated environment, they only have themselves to blame.
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.
When I was nine years old, I started playing guitar, and I took classical guitar lessons and studied music theory. And played jazz for a while. And then when I was around fourteen years old, I discovered punk rock. And so I then tried to unlearn everything I had learned in classical music and jazz so I could play in punk rock bands.
