About six months ago, I listened to Siamese Dream. That was the first time I'd ever really heard my own album, because I had separated from the experience of making the record. And it really moved me. It made me cry, it's so beautiful.

Sometimes people just like being around each other, and good things come out of that.

I really think it's a white, bourgeois idea to pretend that you don't have influences. It seems to be the obsession strictly of white people in college.

These days you're not just competing with the tedium, you're competing with the cellphone.

The deeper I get into my life as a musician, I'm discovering that it becomes less and less about other people, and more about what I want to do. And that's a good place to be.

I know how stupid people can be. I've played in front of 5,000 people that bought a ticket to my concert, and some guy who's bought a ticket decides he's going to throw a bottle at my head. That's a simple act of stupidity. That's not even defiance.

It's what the mainstream does - they absorb things and they blunt the power of it. And so the next generation and the next generation has to become more shocking and more provocative in order to get any rise out of anybody.