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 just have to remind myself that my daily quotidie in life has almost nothing to do with any aspect of my professional life as a public figure.

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.

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

It's sometimes too easy to point fingers when circumstances dramatically go awry, but as an addict, I'm ultimately responsible for my own decisions, no matter how benign or tragic the consequences.

If Nirvana had remained a small, underground punk rock band, Kurt Cobain would still be alive. And he'd probably be living in Seattle, getting kind of fat and balding, be relatively happy and producing records for other people.

I think that the current climate enables a lot of musicians to do relatively well. Twenty-five years ago, you could be a bass player in a folk-rock band and do pretty well - that sort of means that you're going to have to go get a day job. But a lot of my friends have learned how to write classical music for movies and produce other people and do remixes, and DJ and go on tour, and do all these different things. The more diverse their approach, the better their chances of actually having a career.