There are a lot of great animal rights organizations who save dogs and save cats, but the Humane Society is actually really good at working with Congress and getting legislation actually passed.
— Moby
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.
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.
If a musician is making a mediocre, self-indulgent body of work, they have to know that, for the most part, people aren't going to be interested.
When you say 'failure,' that seems really dramatic, but a lot of failure is just really depressing and mundane. I remember the first time I ever played a concert in Italy. I played a venue that held 900 people, and I think five people showed up. It wasn't a big, 'John Carter of Mars' type failure. It wasn't dramatic; it was just depressing.
I'm perfectly happy for my videos to be on YouTube, whether I'm getting paid for them or not. If they're on YouTube, people will see them. If for some reason my videos get taken down from YouTube, well, I apologize. If it was up to me they'd all be up there and they'd all be free.
What sounds good on the radio is really loud kick drums and loud snare drums, when everything's bombastic and in your face. It's the equivalent of a houseguest who screams all the time.
Have I dated a supermodel? Of course not. I'd look ridiculous.
'Arbitrary' and 'odd' are the words which best describe the pattern of my career. I'm perpetually baffled by the whole thing.
The truth is that genetics has robbed me of hair. But it's not interesting to blame genetics.
Call me a nerd if you like, but I do find it hard to leave home without my laptop and a good book.
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.
You know, if you love something, you should love it regardless of whether it costs five dollars or 500 or 5,000 dollars. Unfortunately, that's not the way our culture works, and we do collectively buy into this idea that things that are more expensive probably have more value.
I grew up obsessed with science fiction, and when I was really young, I wanted to be a scientist.
If one of my heroes comes to me and says, 'Do you want to work on something?' I just say, 'Yes.' I don't ask for details; I don't expect to get paid anything. I just love working with my heroes.
If you're inclined to dismiss L.A. as a place of unrelenting vapidity and generic 1980s architecture, then you're doing yourself and L.A. a huge disservice, and you're just not looking hard enough.
I like noise. It's always puzzled me why one of the goals of contemporary recording is to get rid of noise and to eliminate any element of a performance.
I have no patience for anyone who thinks they've figured things out, no patience for people who think they're right at the expense of everyone else. The world is too connected and too complicated to conform to any of our rigid ideas of what it should be like.
The only sort of descriptive adjective or catch phrase for my music would be 'eclectic.'
Whenever I've had success, I never learn from it. Success usually breeds a degree of hubris. When you fail, that's when you learn.
Small, bald white guys like myself - we all kind of look the same.
I don't have children, but I imagine if parents are really pushed on the subject, they probably have favorite children.
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.
When 'Play' first came out, journalists didn't review it; it didn't get radio play. And then it became this big successful record and, I hate to admit this, I found myself liking the fame. I bought into it.
As far as I'm concerned, the whole point of making music is to get it heard by as many people as possible.
Who wakes up when they're worth £120million and says, 'I'm unhappy today but if only I had an extra £2million!'
I'd much rather go to a Banksy art show than a Moby art show. My art is painfully naive.
No one drives in Manhattan - in fact, many of the folks who live in Manhattan don't even have driving licenses!
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.
My mother and I were on welfare and food stamps until I was 18, so I've always had this ethos of, like, 'try and make a little bit of money now because you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow.'
I won't complain about touring, because I really do believe that a public-figure musician complaining about being a public-figure musician is just absurd. Like, 'Boo hoo hoo! I have to stand on stage and people pay attention to me!'
I believe that the role of limited government should be looking after the needs of veterans, the elderly, children and those institutions that improve the quality of life for struggling families - I don't believe that government should bend to serve the needs of subsidized multi-national corporations and entitled billionaires.
A lot of times good, pristine recordings prevent the listener from getting emotionally involved in the music.
In the long, nonillustrious history of white people pilfering African American culture, have I just perpetrated that? I'm motivated by a love for the music and by a love of the performances, and I really hope I haven't done anything bad.
I'm obsessed with politics, and I talk about it any chance I can get. I have strong opinions about how the world should be run.
In 1991 I did an interview wherein I described myself as a 'teetotal Christian,' which was an exaggeration, although I do like tea and Christ.
A lot of my friends who grew up in Manhattan have a strange phobia about Brooklyn. It's big and scary and they get lost.
It's much easier to have a diversified career as an electronic musician than it is as a drummer. Nothing against drummers. If you're a drummer, you just wait around for people to ask you to play drums. But if you have your own studio and can make music, you have the ability to approach music a lot differently.
In a perfect world, I would be 6-foot-3 and have a perfect head of hair and look like Orlando Bloom.
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.
Every time you read an interview with a supermodel, they're always like, 'Oh, I was a such nerd.' I resent that a little bit. I was in the A/V club. I used to eat my lunch in a closet.
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.
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.
Sacha Baron Cohen is one of my heroes.
I may be a lifelong 'downtowner,' but Central Park really is the most amazing and the most beautiful part of New York City.
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.
A great song is a great song, whether it's on vinyl or CD or cassette or reel to reel or mp3. Then again, that might be an overly optimistic view, but I do think that great music will transcend the medium in which it is delivered.
My job of being a musician in a recording studio has nothing to do with being a musician being on tour performing.
At the risk of sounding pedestrian, I'll be completely honest: the first thing I do in the morning is check Google News, partially because it seems sort of random and unbiased and partially because I tend to stay in hotels that don't necessarily have the fastest Internet connections.
In some of the greatest recordings ever made, the performance is a part of the recording. Dylan's 'Rainy Day Women No. 12 and 35' is all about the esthetic of that performance. You can hear the room.
