If I were to be really petulant, I would say New York is the one doing the betraying. Because the New York I fell in love with doesn't really exist anymore.
The demise of the monolithic record industry has been, for a lot of people, really liberating and emancipating.
I sort of use as my guiding principle that show The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Whenever possible, do the stupid thing.
God has taken his chosen people, the problem being you are the only non-chosen person.
When you're signed to a big label you're always in the position of convincing them, especially now because labels are barely keeping the lights on, so getting them to spend a little bit of money is really hard.
I change my mind about things - for a while I was punk rocker, and if you weren't a punk rocker you were an apostate. Then I was a dance music enthusiast, and if you weren't a dance music enthusiast, you were an apostate. I was carnivore, and if you were a vegan, I didn't want to talk to you. Then I was vegan, and if you were a carnivore I didn't want to talk to you.
When I was growing up I was an atheist, then an agnostic, and then I had a good eight or ten years of being quite a serious Christian.
God took his chosen people and we are what's left. He looked at what's left and thought: I could kill you all, but let's see what happens. A little social experiment.
When I was growing up, I fetishised New York City. It was the land of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, it was where Leonard Cohen wrote 'Chelsea Hotel', it was CBGBs and all the punk rock clubs. Artists and musicians lived there, and it was cheap and dangerous.
LA is such a crumbling mess of a city. Basically in all my years of travelling, I haven't found another city in the western world that interest me as much as Los Angeles - which might sound like heresy, but most cities, history has already happened and the people living there are sort of living on the bones of the thousand years of history that's already happened there. Whereas LA is always reinventing itself.
I've had my Charlie Sheen moments, it was usually just at the Mars Bar on the corner of First Avenue with me and a few homeless guys.
A few years ago, before I stopped drinking, I was feeling very sorry for myself and very drunk, and I Googled 'Moby Sucks'. In less than one second something like 20 million responses came up... yeah, there has been a lot of loathing directed towards me, and it used to drive me crazy.
No one wants to be hated, in public, by lots of people.
For some reason New York is the epicentre for people who hate me. Maybe this is another reason why I left New York but I get more hatred directed towards me there than any other place.
The moment a career is on a quantitative downswing, your loathsomeness is sort of attenuated.
I feel like people might be slightly less inclined to hate me as much as they did in the past, and I think part of that is selling fewer records.
There are so many musicians, friends of mine, who play shows for ten people a night, or always desperately wanted a record contract. So even if every person on the planet loathes me, I have nothing to complain about. My job is not a bad job, so I can't complain.
There's really no reason for any musician, writer, actor to ever take themselves seriously. If you work in a needle exchange, take yourself seriously. You're doing good work. If you're involved in hostage negotiations and saving lives, you can have a sense of entitlement.
When Britney shaves off all her hair and beats paparazzi with umbrellas - that's what celebrities are supposed to do. They're not supposed to be reasonable, middle-aged guys drinking organic tea talking about semiotics.
A vegan who beats his wife is far further down the ethical ladder than a meat eater who's kind to his children.
I don't think of myself as a singer; I usually end up singing when I can't find anyone better to sing, or when I'm too lazy to find someone better.
You can't find an uglier urban environment than the centre of Hollywood, but then you go to Griffith Park, you go to the beach, you go to the mountains, and it's rural. I live up in the Hollywood Hills and I have frogs, owls, coyotes, mountain lions - but I'm ten minutes from the centre of the city.
When I was a drunk, New York was the greatest place in the world. You walk everywhere, everything is open until four in the morning, and people go to New York looking for debauchery.
For my most of my career I've been a falling-down drunk. Most of my interviews were done hungover, and for a while it was great.
I'm sure most people have this experience: when you're young you drink, you do drugs, you stay up late, and there are no consequences.
