Love is larger than life.
Maybe there's some unquenchable question that I keep asking the universe that I can't get an answer to.
I think that's what centers me the most - all my people, all my animals.
Sometimes the song title comes with the songs, other times you just sorta make something up afterwards.
When I do yoga, it gets all sweaty, and the best thing for dried up hair isn't shampoo, it's sweat.
I know that is absolutely true for people when they are young - you don't want to be alive if the things that you love in your life aren't there.
We want, or wanted, to believe that without love we would disappear, that love, somehow, would save us that, yeah, if we have love, give love and know love, we are truly alive and if there is no love, there would be no life. The Terror is, we know now, that even without love, life goes on... we just go on there is no mercy killing.
Love is not a magic gravity that keeps everything up.
We wouldn't be artists, writers, painters, musicians, if we weren't sensitive.
I think when people think of music from coming from Oklahoma, they think of Toby Keith or even Garth Brooks or even Woody Guthrie. People think, "Why do we have to just be about the Bible and about football? Why can't we be about something like the Flaming Lips?" And I salute them! I say, "Well, that's great if you want that."
Life is worth celebrating and worth living even though we're all headed to the same hole at the end of the day.
Without art, without communicating, we wouldn't live beyond 30 because we'd be so sad and depressed.
A lot of times I'll doodle on something while I'm doing interviews, because sometimes I'm on the phone for three or four hours and I want to get something going. I'll just start from a scribble, or something that someone else already put on the page.
I can see that if this was an album done 10 or 15 years ago we could see we were moving on to some place else.
I think the more music becomes something you could simply download and have on your iPod, I think to a lot of people that is plenty, but to some people, they still want these artifacts that are touchable, and you can smell them, and look at them, and hold them and just have other dimensions of experience with this music.
There is a lot of melody and things that sound familiar in hundreds of songs.
There's a cave, we go inside of ourselves because we want to know more, and we turn this one corner and we go, Oh my god - I didn't know that was in here. We can never go back to the way we were. It's like a horrible car accident - you're never the same after that. It's something that you'll think about every day for the rest of your life.
Eating good things and being around people who are happy - you want to be influenced by the world because it has so many cool things about it, but it also has a bunch of bad things about it. Being around people who are happy and people who are creative, that's what you do if you're lucky in your life.
There were a couple of times where I shot things, or started off in one mode and thought, "Well, I really didn't want to do that." I would just change my mind. And frankly, I don't think anybody really cared. I didn't have some producer that had given me $10 million, demanding results. I could just kind of do whatever I thought was right, and move in that way.
Making movie you just think, well, you know what you're gonna do, and you just when it comes down to the very specifics of it, you kind of have to rely on your mode of panic, and how well your imagination and creativity and all that works when you're in that moment. And you know, frankly, I never worried about that. I never worried that as we moved into the very specifics of it.
I want to know what you're thinking, you want to know what I'm thinking. But we're alone. In our own minds. We're trapped in this sort of isolation.
I do think there is a segment of people in Oklahoma that really do love the Flaming Lips and love this other idea of what someone from Oklahoma could be like. I've sort of become the spokesperson for this "other person" who could come from Oklahoma.
Your life is built on when love dies.
I got very lucky that some of the things that I wanted to work did work. Not because I knew what I was doing, just through dumb luck, it just looked beautiful and sounded great and captured some magical mood. And you just have to hope that you get lucky when you do big things like making a movie, or something.
The movie that we could've finished in 2001 would've sucked. The movie that we could've finished in 2002 would've just been a disaster, even into 2003, it would've been very cobbled together, amateuristic stuff. But as we went along, we really did stumble upon some accidental themes, and with the things you could do with computers, and all that sort of stuff just sort of really accelerated into where the stuff that we could do right here at my house became - you could almost do anything.