I can spend years studying and being in therapy and having a very analytic spiritual meditation practice, but without the emotional component, without the softening that comes with love and vulnerability, everything else I do is really just surface.
I find London really exciting but there's a lot of vicious success here. Like New York, there's a lot of incredibly successful people who feel incredibly entitled, perhaps justifiably, but I don't want to be around viciously entitled people.
I don't put a lot of pressure on myself when I'm writing. It feels like if I come up with something good, or I come up with something bad, I'm not too worried.
Oftentimes things that seem really difficult and traumatic in the short term seem a lot less difficult and traumatic in the long term.
The worst case scenario is you really like someone's work, then you meet them and they're a self-involved, entitled douchebag.
The idea of feeling old is much more the worry of a slightly younger person. When you are getting old, that becomes - psssh - completely secondary to the absolute understanding of how short your life is.
In the past I've had public feuds with people, and I have really not benefited from any of them. The feud with Eminem did kind of torpedo my career in the United States, but it also introduced me to Middle America in a way I never could have conceived of.
I was trying to convince myself I could learn to be gay - but no. That's one of my great regrets.
Should the progressives in Germany in the 30s have tolerated the National Socialists? Of course they shouldn't have.
Old people go to the polls because they can't get erections, young people stay home, do drugs and have sex.
I think the ideal job in that alternative universe would be to lead whitewater rafting trips through the Grand Canyon. So maybe I'd be a guy leading whitewater rafting trips at the Grand Canyon. Or maybe a professional skydiver.
The moment somebody becomes famous, 15 years gets knocked off their life. They're gonna get divorced a few times, they're gonna be addicted to things, they're gonna be in therapy.
Since I stopped drinking my love life has taken a really serious hit. Romantic encounters that seemed like a really good idea at three o'clock in the morning on the Lower East Side? Less so in sobriety.
Under no circumstances do I ever want to see any part of me having sex! I wouldn't want to see video tape, pictures, in the mirror, nothing.
Britney [Spears]'s actually kind of like a broken-down shell of a human being, that's what makes her so endearing and compelling.
If you look at the history of popular music, the most successful musicians have started out being really marginal and esoteric. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Madonna. Prince. Bruce Springsteen. Fleetwood Mac. David Bowie. Public Enemy. Nirvana.
I just have to remind myself that my daily quotidie in life has almost nothing to do with any aspect of my professional life as a public figure. And I think a lot of people get to that point - specifically, sort of getting comfortable looking out for yourself and taking care of yourself and defining yourself based on healthier criteria, and not criteria that's established by complete strangers that you've never met.
To paraphrase Paul from the New Testament, he has a great soliloquy about love, where he's basically saying, if I've figured out the secrets of the universe but I don't have love, figuring out the secrets of universe means nothing.
I saw people around me who were falling deeper and deeper into alcoholism and substance abuse. It's seductive because alcohol is amazing and drugs are amazing, they work so well.
I like to quote Homer Simpson: 'I'm like a chocoholic except for alcohol.' I come from a long line of alcoholics. It's funny because when I first started making records, I was at the tail end of a period of sobriety, so I somehow got this reputation as Captain Sober.
Everyone feels awkward, everyone feels uncomfortable, everyone gets older, everyone gets lonely, everyone gets sick, everyone eventually dies.
I like being vegan, I think it's good for my health.
I have no perspective as regards my work. One reason I put out records and books is people respond to it, and it enables you to actually see the work more clearly. It's a form of therapy for me. Sometimes abusive therapy.
I think that growing up very poor in a very wealthy town gave me a sense of being an outsider, and I hated it when I was growing up.
We live in this culture where there are so many things that want us to pretend that we’re not truly human. That we can be exempt from the human condition, either through intelligence or accomplishment or success or humor. Bu 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.
