I personally feel the need to experience life and new music and ideas before I can sit down and start writing music again.

To be honest, I didn't really get into making music to be an album artist.

Cutting and pasting is the essence of what hip-hop culture is all about for me. It's about drawing from what's around you, and subverting it and decontextualizing it.

In certain cases I don't want to sell tracks individually; I want to only sell the whole album. With simple things like that I just don't get any response [from iTunes]. I don't want to kill iTunes - I just want to offer my own retail experience in my own tiny corner of the Internet.

If you think of any long-term artist that makes music throughout several decades, you would hope that it's autobiographical and a form of self-expression, and that's certainly how I approach my music.

I feel less and less like that every year, and I guess maybe even more so with every new record that I put out. I just think, as the years go by, it's harder and harder to really find a reason to be annoyed that you made something that people want to continuously talk about. Certainly there are contexts in which the record can be discussed which will get me on the defensive and make me want to put some kind of calibration or some kind of context on what the record means in relation to my career as a whole.

I feel like you're being coy if you don't do something and celebrate the 20th or 25th anniversary in some way. Just as I've never, ever had any kind of embargo on playing songs from Endtroducing, no matter how much I wanted people to like my new stuff - I've never, ever stopped playing Endtroducing, for that reason as well. It's a give and take - it's a balance. If there's one theme, I guess, to this entire discussion, then it's that.