There's a certain group of people who are always going to dislike me and disagree with whatever I say.

I think it's the pain and suffering that drive you to become an artist. The art itself should be the pain, sort of exorcising every demon and making you feel like you're a person that matters.

As a performer, I wanted to be the loudest, most persistent alarm clock I could be, because there didn’t seem like any other way to snap society out of its Christianity- and media-induced coma.

Don't ever empty the bucket of mystery. Never let people define what you do. It's not about zigging when you should zag. It's not about doing something unprecedented and unpredictable. It's just about never being a word, or something that is not in the process of transformation...

People are too lazy and too stupid to think for themselves that we've got sitcoms with canned laughter that lets you know when to laugh if you're too stupid to know when the joke is.

And that's the type of thing I'm trying to speak out against the most, religion controlling what we see and what we do in our personal lives, even if you're not a part of that religion. Antichrist Superstar[the album] is a challenge really, to traditional morality and it's...to make people question that and make people think about different perspectives.

I think people have always misinterpreted my self-destructive nature as nihilistic, because if you don't care about the world, you can't create art. I am misanthropic and self-loathing, but never nihilistic. And I think I act far worse off-stage than onstage.