Moby Quotes

Maybe it's a form of overcompensation, but whenever I've toured, I've always needed a huge performance component.

A lot of people do talk about the demise of the album, but I still believe that if an artist tries hard to make a great album, people will buy it and listen to it as an album, rather than just a collection of random songs.

There is a dysfunctional strangeness to Los Angeles that doesn't exist in any other western city. The roads are crumbling, no-one knows what they're doing, the city government barely works.

I buy things with the best of intention of living in them and then life intercedes.

Better a loving single-parent family than a 'conventional' family where the parents hate each other and the father is a demagogue.

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

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.

It seems so antithetical to the teachings of Christ to proclaim your faith in public. I mean, of course you're not supposed to hide your light under a bushel.

I had an epiphany a few years ago where I was out at a celebrity party and it suddenly dawned on me that I had yet to meet a celebrity who is as smart and interesting as any of my friends.

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

Being a vegan is pretty easy these days, as almost every town and city has health food stores and vegetarian-friendly restaurants.

For me the most important issue is climate change because it in some ways trumps every other issue. Everything else we care about falls by the wayside if the Greenland ice shelf falls into the sea. And if suddenly sea levels rise 21 feet, everything we hold near and dear ceases to exist.

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

I have actually found myself buying up more and more old analogue gear. I have this strange obsession with old drum machines.

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.

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.

Some of the songs I've made, I'm really disappointed in how I mixed them.

What fascinates me about addiction and obsessive behavior is that people would choose an altered state of consciousness that's toxic and ostensibly destroys most aspects of your normal life, because for a brief moment you feel okay.

I always just made music that resonates with me emotionally.

I was never encouraged to believe anything. I was brought up in a profoundly agnostic or pantheistic community.

I've worked with all sorts of random people - everybody from Metallica to Britney Spears to Ozzy Osbourne to Michael Jackson to the Beastie Boys. I've got a really strange CV. It's interesting - I work with a lot of these disparate, different people to learn what it's like to work with random people.

In a perfect world, I would be 6-foot-3 and have a perfect head of hair and look like Orlando Bloom.

When I dj at big venues I try to play tracks that I would want to hear if I were e'd up in a field with 50,000 other people.

I like singing, but it's certainly not my strong point.

I remember I went to Berlin right after the Wall came down. I first went to East Berlin, and all the buildings were old and falling down, and now when you go back to Berlin, you know you're in the East because all the buildings are brand new and very tall.

I live in New York and I love hanging out in gay clubs, and a lot of my friends are gay. But, for better or for worse, I'm not gay.

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.

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.

The reason I didn't like cocaine is it made me do stupid things, have stupid conversations, and stay awake until 11 o'clock in the morning unable to think, read, sleep or speak.

I think we're like farm animals before an earthquake.

Music is just air moving around.

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.

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.

Because we find something distasteful is not justification enough for us to deem it criminal.

For his sake I'm sorry that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil, but for our sake and the sake of music I'm glad he did.

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.

As people continue to do more and buy more over the Internet, continue to meet people over the Internet, connection speeds are going to get faster, and the Internet is just going to become an even more integral part of people's lives.

When I was in my twenties, I thought I was bulletproof.

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.

What I love about making albums in the 21st century is that so few people buy albums! I can make an album without any commercial concerns whatsoever.

The way I work on music is that I go into my studio, and I start playing music, and I see what happens, and ... I never think about it.

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.

You make mistakes and you learn from them.

I'm a terrible cook, so I usually eat out with friends.

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.

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.

I'm sorry, I don't mean to judge, but I've read the gospels quite a few times, and it seems pretty clear that 'Christian values' are: 1-humility, 2-non-judgementalism, 3-caring for the poor, 4-compassion, 5-love, and 6-serving God.

These new metal bands are going out, getting drunk and going to strip clubs, and they'll be doing the same in thirty years. There isn't even an interesting self-destructive quality to it ... it's just dumb.

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.

Musically, New York is a big influence on me. Walk down the street for five minutes and you'll hear homeless punk rockers, people playing Caribbean music and reggae, sacred Islamic music and Latino music, so many different types of music.

Nothing can stop us now 'cause we are all made of stars.

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.

The strange thing about hotel rooms is that they look familiar and seem familiar and have many of the accoutrements that seem domestic and familiar, but they are really weird, alien and anonymous places.

I feel like once the song is done, you put it out there and if people want to do bizarre remixes, if people want to make strange videos, great. You know, like chaos theory applied to the music business.

Sit down, close your eyes, and think about dogs for ten minutes. On a very clear, physiological, and neurochemical level, your body is changed by these really positive thoughts.

What makes me feel old is having no hair on the top of my head.

Personally I find the democratic chaos of the Internet fascinating, and for the most part really benign.

Sacha Baron Cohen is one of my heroes.

I love nyc. It's the city of my birth and probably the most amazing city on the planet.

If you and I become vegans, the global consequences aren't going to be that much. But if we can get a few hundred million people to become a little more aware and cut back on their animal consumption, the consequences will be great.

Who wakes up when they're worth £120million and says, 'I'm unhappy today but if only I had an extra £2million!'

If someone is cynical and doesn't vote and ends up with a crummy job in a crummy country with a decimated environment, they only have themselves to blame.

When famous people are nice to me, it feels good, so I'm happy to hang out with them. It's better than being at home, depressed, reading 'The Hobbit.'

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.

I grew up obsessed with science fiction, and when I was really young, I wanted to be a scientist.

I'm like a bad musical cliche because I bring my guitar on the road and try to write songs in hotel rooms.

Scotland is one of my favourite places to perform: it's really something special. Scottish audiences are just so enthusiastic; their approach to dance music just feels similar to my own somehow.

Why can't a democrat get fired up about protecting the environment and enacting gun control legislation just as right wing republicans get fired up about making sure that children have access to assault weapons and banning 'the catcher in the rye' and 'harry potter'?

Without David Bowie, popular music as we know it pretty much wouldn't exist.

One of the main reasons I'm vegan is because I'm ethically lazy. My friends who eat meat or who eat eggs have to sometimes wrestle with the ethical consequences of their actions. By being vegan, I take the easy way out.

One of the nice things about licensing music to movies or advertisements is you can reach a lot of people who normally wouldn't hear music.

Basically we should stop doing those things that are destructive to the environment, other creatures, and ourselves and figure out new ways of existing.

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

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

One can only snort so many ants and have so much sex before one starts to long for the comfort and companionship of a good book.

I've done the performing monkey stuff and massive breakdowns, it's just they weren't documented.

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.

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.

I've dated some very enthusiastic, attractive people and some very unenthusiastic, less attractive people. I see no correlation. But female friends of mine who have dated male public figures have found that is the case. They say male models are terrible in bed, because they feel like just showing up is all the effort they need to make.

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.

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.

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.

In 1992 I was doing one of my first ever tours and I was in Heathrow airport and I saw these middle-aged musicians who had clearly been on tour for decades, and they all looked haggard and unhappy and unhealthy. I vowed to myself that I would never be that person. Flash forward 20 years and I found myself in Heathrow looking haggard and unhappy and unhealthy. I decided I would rather spend my time staying home working on music and making dinner with friends, instead of spending six months in a hotel in a state of depressing suspended adolescence.

I've made records that everyone has hated and I've loved, and made records that everyone has loved and I've deemed, at best, mediocre.

My reason for becoming a vegetarian was simple: I loved (and love) animals

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.

The only sort of descriptive adjective or catch phrase for my music would be 'eclectic.'

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.

As long as the world continues to be strange and interesting, I still want to take pictures of it.

I look back and think of all the times I've had to let things go in the past, and how traumatic it seemed while it was happening, but how my understanding of it changed as time passed - and oftentimes things that seem really difficult and traumatic in the short term seem a lot less difficult and traumatic in the long term. So I remind myself of that.

The young have to kill the old. The young, if they want to achieve their own platform, have to diminish the reputations of the ones that have gone before. That's how life works.

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.

I can't think of any musician or producer who has influenced me more than Brian Eno. From when he was in Roxy Music, producing Devo, the Talking Heads and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

When I was growing up, I was the most pretentious person I have ever met. I only read obscure books and watched obscure movies and only listened to obscure music.

I wanted to have a title that wasn't in English so that someone in France, for instance, could ask for 'dix-huit' or the someone in Japan could ask for 'juhachi.'

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.

A vegan who beats his wife is far further down the ethical ladder than a meat eater who's kind to his children.

There's no wrong way to meditate. And meditation should never be a difficult practice that leads to self criticism.

I run into a lot of people who are instantly filled with ridicule at the idea that someone wouldn't eat meat.

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.