Moby Quotations | Page 2

There are some public figures who are very private and almost hide behind their work. I try to be as open as possible.

There is a lot of music in the world that I love that does not always get the appropriate exposure.

When public figures think they can open a business even though they've got no business experience, it's a bad idea.

Whereas for me, touring tends to be a very strange and isolating experience.

I like noise. It's always puzzled me why one of the goals of contemporary recording is to get rid of noise and to eliminate any element of a performance.

I wish I could sing. I don't technically have a terrible voice, but it's certainly not as good as most of my friends. Whenever I hear myself on a record, it just reminds me I'm not a very good singer.

It's enshrined in our Constitution that an individual has a right to release information and disseminate information that makes the powers that be uncomfortable.

The good thing about working alone is I get a lot done and I can experiment more. The bad thing is I miss out on the gregarious, social way that most musicians work.

Every time you read an interview with a supermodel, they're always like, 'Oh, I was a such nerd.' I resent that a little bit. I was in the A/V club. I used to eat my lunch in a closet.

For me, New York still ranks as the most beautiful and the most interesting city in the world. It is also the most varied in terms of the things it has to offer.

For years, my mom dated a man who was really active in the Baptist church in the town next to the town I grew up in, and so he used to drag me to these Baptist church services that lasted forever. I remember that I didn't like the church services, but I really liked the music.

I feel compelled to make art that on one hand reflects and sometimes almost creates like a sense of comfort when confronted with the strangeness of the world.

I thought that my life would be spent working in a bookstore, teaching community college, and making music in my spare time that no one would be willing to listen to.

I won't complain about touring, because I really do believe that a public-figure musician complaining about being a public-figure musician is just absurd. Like, 'Boo hoo hoo! I have to stand on stage and people pay attention to me!'

In the course of my life, I've made some happy songs but it's the more sort of like pathos-laden, emotional, melancholic music that either I make or that other people make that really resonates with me.

It's a very strange phenomenon being hated by people you've never met. Some journalists just seem to hate me and everything I do, and it's disconcerting because I've never met this person.

New York is such a competitive place; it tears people apart. People come here and, if they can't make it in the first month, they get torn apart and they have to go back to where they came from. I don't think that's terribly healthy.

You can sit down with Reason or Ableton and literally in a couple of hours make a very good-sounding record. But then a lot of people become contented with that, rather than pushing themselves to making something that sounds great.

We were totally destroyed, ... We're planning to put them in another facility until we can rebuild.

When I was growing up, albums were my closest friends, as sad as that may sound - Joy Division's 'Closer,' or Echo and the Bunnymen's 'Heaven Up Here'... I had a more intimate relationship with those records than I did with most of the people in my life.

The progressive movement needs more crazy and amoral/immoral right-wing politicians and pundits like Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich and Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity.

Small, bald white guys like myself - we all kind of look the same.

I'm investing in a company that has patented wallet technology that will deodorize currency. That way people won't have to deal with money that smells funny.

If you're inclined to dismiss L.A. as a place of unrelenting vapidity and generic 1980s architecture, then you're doing yourself and L.A. a huge disservice, and you're just not looking hard enough.

I feel like someone who's meditating could possibly benefit their meditation practice and their well-being just by sitting down and thinking about things that they love for ten minutes.

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.

God has taken his chosen people, the problem being you are the only non-chosen person.

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.

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.

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.

Whether the Virgin Mary existed, I don't know. But the human need for her to appear in tortilla, that's what inspires my interest.

I've been making music for thirty-six years and, you know, I'm still just as in love with working on music now as I was thirty-six years ago.

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.

The demise of the monolithic record industry has been, for a lot of people, really liberating and emancipating.

I have to say that being a vegan in 1986 or whenever was a lot different than being a vegan in 2012. You'd go to health foods stores and basically your choice was between Mung beans and nutritional yeast, and that's about it.

That softness around your eyes, a softness in your face. Almost the way you feel when you're about to start crying. That, to me, is love. It can be romantic love, it can be friendship love, it can be family love, it can be love for a chipmunk. It can be love for anything.

I spent so much of my life reading about spirituality and reading about neuroscience and trying different meditation practices. It's a really big part of my life. But it's sometimes hard to talk about. There are so many people in the world who don't live in Southern California and don't spend their time meditating.

It's perfectly natural for me to sit down and talk about meditating and spiritual practice with my friends. But then I realize, how would it sound to a drunk cynical guy in London?

Musicians, actors, writers - we're all neurotic, odd people who've lucked into accidental careers. So I just don't like being around public figures with that sense of entitlement, it just seems unhealthy, and it strips so much potential for them to develop as a human being.

One of the goals of a spiritual practice is self-awareness, and one of the best tools of self-awareness is simple emotional vulnerability.

One of the problems with being relatively conscious and human is that you want to help everybody.

I feel like the vast majority of the world's problems would disappear if suddenly everyone on the planet were relatively self-aware and capable of honest self-love and compassion.

The most emotional part is when I go into my studio every day and pretty much never have an idea of what's gonna happen.

The worst case scenario is you really like someone's work, then you meet them and they're a self-involved, entitled douchebag.

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 listen to gospel singers pouring their heart out to God, it's the act of pouring their hearts out that interests me.

Never have public feuds with anyone who's surrounded by people who carry guns.

In some ways it's hard to see electronic music as a genre because the word "electronic" just refers to how it's made. Hip-hop is electronic music. Most reggae is electronic. Pop is electronic. House music, techno, all these sorts of ostensibly disparate genres are sort of being created with the same equipment.

My interest in gospel music and liturgical art and Biblically-inspired literature has nothing to do with organised religion and everything to do with human beings trying to figure out their place on this planet.

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 sort of use as my guiding principle that show The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Whenever possible, do the stupid thing.

I taught Bible Study, and there was period where I thought all of my beliefs were right, and everybody who disagreed with me was wrong.

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.

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.

I found it incredibly disheartening that in the late '90s, suddenly pop culture became even more misogynistic and more homophobic, and so I criticized Eminem for having lyrics that were egregiously homophobic and egregiously misogynistic.

Honestly, the most vulnerable part of my life is probably just honest expression, as cliché as that might sound.

I guess the most emotional part is when I have that moment when I end up writing something that I really, really love. So not only is there the emotional connection with the music that's being created, but there's also the magic of the fact that you're essentially creating something from nothing.

I think that, for a lot of us, the closer we get to showing people who we really are, that's where we feel the most uncomfortable, the most vulnerable. But it's also where the healthiest growth comes from. Like when I can really open myself up to someone and show someone who I really am, it's amazing when it happens.

Oftentimes things that seem really difficult and traumatic in the short term seem a lot less difficult and traumatic in the long term.

When I was growing up, all I wanted to do was fit in, but if you're perpetually an outsider, it gives you a perspective that might have a little more objectivity than people who really feel connected to their social environment in which they grow up.

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.

All I want to do with my life is try and make music that I really love, and so every day I try and work on music.

The midlife crisis you're having at 30 is indulgent, but the midlife crisis you have at 45 is to an extent thrust upon you.

I've been having a midlife crisis since I was four years old.

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 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.

I guess...on one hand, I spent way too much time watching science fiction and reading science fiction when I was growing up. But a part of it is I also never felt much of a connection to the world in which I lived while I was growing up, and so, oddly enough, I think I felt a lot more connected to the worlds that I read about in science fiction.

At 3 o'clock in the morning on tour when you're sober is a lot less fun than 3 a.m. when you're drunk in a bar or in a nightclub. But having said that, 9 in the morning on tour sober is immeasurably better than 9 a.m. on tour when you're hung over and feeling like death.

There was a time when I was way too reliant upon other people's opinions and perspective of me. And I guess over time came to see how unhealthy that was. I mean it's almost like a sign of mental illness to base your self-worth on the opinions of complete strangers.

I don't think too much about how it might exist in the world in a commercial sense - I more just try and focus on making music that I love and trying to put it out into the world.

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.

There's nothing in the actual Bible that limits a Christian in their appreciation of or interest in science. Anti-science is purely a function of ignorant fundamentalism.

I've been making electronic music for twenty some odd years but, because I grew up playing in punk rock bands, when I started touring, I thought in order to be a viable touring musician I had to do it with a band. I would DJ or tour with a full rock band.

I realized the universe is 15 billion years old and unspeakably complicated. I still love the teachings of Christ, but I also believe that the human condition prevents us from having any true objective knowledge and understanding of the universe.

If I had to label myself now, I'd call myself a Taoist-Christian-agnostic quantum mechanic.

I've been an animal rights activist and a vegan for 28 years. The entire time, I've asked myself: How do I best advance an animal rights agenda?

I'm offended by the is-ought fallacy, which has been used to justify slavery, women not being allowed to vote, children working in factories.

The moment that you impose your will on another person or animal, that's when we are allowed to say you have committed an ethical breach.

I always just made music that resonates with me emotionally.

I'm not trying to look for pity or sympathy. I was just surprised that so many people in the world of entertainment seemed to be okay with misogyny and homophobia as long as they were profiting from it.

When I was very young, I played in a punk-rock band, but I also studied music theory and classical music.

To choose one type of music at the exclusion of another would feel kind of sad and arbitrary.

I think it'd be great if Prince made an album of just romantic, slow ballads.

My main interest is just to work with people who have beautiful, interesting, emotive voices; I'm not too concerned whether someone is famous.

I have nothing against bombastic music, but when it comes to making albums, I'd prefer to make music that has a sort of vulnerable subtlety to it.

An artist in 2014 who is thinking about album sales is either sadly deluded or has to make so many commercial compromises that it sort of takes the joy out of making music.

My goal with everything that I do is to present things in a way that I would want to see if I was in the audience or buying the record.

My goal is to make one-not a hodgepodge, but just the sort of record that I would want to listen to.

When someone comes to me and says the music I've made has affected them emotionally, that's the most gratifying part of my job.

I love lots of different types of music, but it's music that has this up-swelling of beauty and emotion that is most important to me.

There are so many causes. Gun control, climate change, deforestation, animal welfare, human welfare, education. Working on the big issues is noble and great, but being aware of what's going on around you right at this moment, being kind to the people around you, extending compassion and decency, not just to everyone you meet but also to yourself - I think that's one of the biggest challenges most people face.

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 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.

By being vulnerable, either with yourself or in the presence of another person, that's where all growth and ultimate well-being comes from.

What makes me vulnerable is any genuine expression of emotion in the presence of another person. It makes me vulnerable and my inclination is, of course, immediately to back away from anything that makes me vulnerable.

People who meditate and have a good spiritual practice, their immune systems are stronger. Generally, they are happier and healthier.

A lot of people have realized that a good spiritual practice and a good meditation practice have real benefit. It's not just something nice to do to make the universe happy.

For me, love is very non-academic. Love, it's a very physical thing. I don't mean physical in terms of - I mean, it can be sexual. But those moments when I'm aware of the fact that I love someone or love something, it really manifests physically.

I love Thich Nhat Hahn. One of my favorite quotes of his (and I'm paraphrasing), he's talking about cultivating happiness, and he was saying, at the very least, just be happy you're not at the dentist right now. He was talking to someone who was having a really hard time finding joy.

We almost need to cultivate - I hate to sound New Age-y - but to cultivate a positive bias, and really work to focus on those things and notice those things that are wonderful and uplifting.