I think I'm really lucky that the things I'm able to love - people, animals - it's like the more you put yourself into it, the more you get out of it.
I think making movie is kind of like getting fat people to walk 20 miles. If you just do it 100 yards at a time, and nobody knows how far they are going, they can do it!I would include myself in those fat people! You do this little by little and you don't realize your potential, or you don't realize how really rich, and how far you can go.
We are all really alone. We're isolated in our own mind.
I think that most of the people I'm dealing with, they're a lot like me. So I'm not pushing people that don't want to do something; most of the people have a billion things going on, and they love it.
I call it "being interrupted by success." We had done The Soft Bulletin, which came out in 1999, and we knew we that were gonna make another record before too long. But in between this, we were still in this mode of kind of just - not re-creating what we could be, but kind of doing different things. For the longest time in the Flaming Lips we were like, "Make a record, go on tour. Come back, make another record," and you know, I think, frankly, we were kind of like, "There's more to life than just recording records and going on tour."
I think if you're lucky, you start to make music and it gets things out.
You can't really imagine every moment of a movie in the same way that you wouldn't expect a novelist to envision every sentence of his 800-page novel.
Occasionally there are people who are not like me, and I forget that they're more introverted or shy, or just don't want to make a decision so quickly.
I always knew, since I'm the one making the movie, if I didn't like it, I'd just simply build another set and do it again. I was the one doing it all, so I never really worried about if I didn't like it. I just thought, "Well, if I didn't like it, I'll just do it again! Who cares?"
Instagram is a great example of you just doing your thing.
I'll accept the pain and the suffering, because I know that in that there's a lot of beauty, too.
I think some of the musicians are more like punk rock musicians. It's like an art as opposed to being a musician. It's definitely more radical psychedelic bands, more than anything.
Your life, unfortunately - and I mean this - your life is built on when love dies. There's a lot of love in your life that will simply die. And you wish that you died with it, you know? But you don't. And you go, oh, well, here I am.
Everything that you do in your life that helps you sweat is good for you.
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.
Even though I don't have any kids of my own, I love this idea of family and taking care of things.
Advertising agencies come to you and they are great fans, they are great creative people themselves, but they ask you to do something, and you say, "Well, we will, we'll create something together." And it is work. It's like you're doing something and they're saying, "Change this" and "Change that." It's not hard, horrible work, but creatively it's not just freedom.
If you have a song that you think sounds like another song you should contact the publishing company and say I have a song here, let's cut a deal that lets everyone walk away feeling good.
I want people to be ecstatic but to cry at the same time.
I stopped caring so much about what people might think if I sung about love and humanity.
I knew she was from Australia and I knew that is where she started but I didn't know if she was still popular there. I hope people understand we aren't making fun of Kylie.
I am not that thrilled about the way our records sound anyway. Don't get me wrong, I work hard on them and I want them to sound fantastic but I'm happy to have another interpretation of them anyway.
I embrace the idea that I'm an entertainer.
Most artists I run into aren't that thrilled with what they do anyway. They are glad to have different versions out there to see which one the audience likes the best.
To try to please people is an endless chasing of one's own tail. That's not very satisfying, so we do what we like and that satisfies us. When it does work out, its a bonus, really.
