Could you look an animal in the eyes and say to it, 'My appetite is more important than your suffering'?
I don't know many artists who are happy with themselves all of the time.
My reason for becoming a vegetarian was simple: I loved (and love) animals
To truly live a creative life means that you will need to experiment in as many different fields as possible.
I'm like a monk with a taste for hookers.
Biologically we’re all the same. We all get sad, we all get happy, and we all die. Anyone who pretends that that’s not the case is either a sociopath or utterly delusional.
I'm just fascinated with the world that I can see, but I'm even more fascinated with the world that I can't see.
Dogs have boundless enthusiasm but no sense of shame. I should have a dog as a life coach.
People don't truly respond to something until they see the direct consequences.
Music can always serve a role in people's lives when it's emotional and warm and inviting and beautiful.
If the entire world decided to become vegan tomorrow, a whole host of the world's problems would disappear overnight. Climate change would decrease by 25 percent, deforestation would cease, rainforests would be preserved, our water- and air-quality would increase, life-expectancy rates would increase, and our rates of cancer would plummet, so certainly, with that one action of becoming vegan you are quite effectively making the world a better place.
Over time I just realised the world is a very complicated place, and there is not a single structured belief system that adequately and comprehensively describes every aspect of our existence. So that is my new approach to life and spirituality - I don't know anything, except on a very naive and subjective level.
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.
If Nirvana had remained a small, underground punk rock band, Kurt Cobain would still be alive. And he'd probably be living in Seattle, getting kind of fat and balding, be relatively happy and producing records for other people.
I like the humility that comes from being hated. Hopefully some humility and compassion comes out of that.
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.
And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves, and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.
So in 1987 I gave up all animal products and became a vegan. Simply so that I could eat and live in accordance with my beliefs that animals have their own lives, that they're entitled to their own lives and that contributing to animal suffering is something that I don't want to be a part of.
There's something about the human brain, that it actually has a predilection towards negativity, which served us really well when we lived in an environment that was very threatening.
But when a man’s religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him.
The main thing that excites me and makes me want to get out of bed is the thought of being able to go into my studio to work on music.
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.
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.
There's an aesthetic theme, which is cities at two o'clock in the morning. Not cities packed with people going out to clubs and dancing but desolate, empty streets. It's off-putting but there's a strange comfort to it as well, that desolate urban environment.
Intellectually, human beings and animals may be different, but it's pretty obvious that animals have a rich emotional life and that they feel joy and pain. It's easy to forget the connection between a hamburger and the cow it came from. But I forced myself to acknowledge the fact that every time I ate a hamburger, a cow had ceased to breathe
