Ten people who are into our music is better than three hundred people who are just standing there.

An acceptance of your cultural inheritance, and at the same time a dislike of it, is a building block of good art.

These are things that I continue to enjoy speaking about. The woods. Boats. Greeks. I think the real heart of it, is really being in love with these Dutch paintings over the last several years.

Tour is disgusting, actually, I have no idea how people do it. Your brain would go to rot, unless you really, really worked hard at making sure it didn't.

Bruegel has these paintings of people just... interacting with each other. And there's this special wink - it's not a celebration of nature, it's people that are mongrels, and half-wits, and they're doing terrible things. I don't know, it just seems like something worth singing about.

You don't expect people to go, music has just been reinvented! But the hope is that people won't say, this is the most boring cliché. I mean, that's one of my pursuits, is trying to not become a cliché, or get stuck in that. But even that's a cliché in itself! It's difficult! But I think it's worth it.... It's a real vicious circle there.

It's like, symbolic language, the way that people approach dense poetry... it always bugs me, because that approach suggests that it's like a mystery novel, and that if you can put together the clues, you can come up with one singular answer.

We hate our heroes, you know. That's one of the great things about this whole deconstruction thing - there's no more heroes. It's always been there, you just look at people's reactions, and when the good guys are skunks, those parts stick with us.

Live is best. You have movement, and I think we should do as much as we can to put that sense of movement in the recorded music.