There's a cave, we go inside of ourselves because we want to know more, and we turn this one corner and we go, Oh my god - I didn't know that was in here. We can never go back to the way we were. It's like a horrible car accident - you're never the same after that. It's something that you'll think about every day for the rest of your life.

I wish I did believe in God. It would be a great relief to think, 'God'll take care of it. God'll put gas in the car tomorrow'.

I always knew, since I'm the one making the movie, if I didn't like it, I'd just simply build another set and do it again. I was the one doing it all, so I never really worried about if I didn't like it. I just thought, "Well, if I didn't like it, I'll just do it again! Who cares?"

I think if you're lucky, you start to make music and it gets things out.

I remember when my father was dying, I remember listening to Bjork, and listening to John Coltrane, and these things, and I don't know why but music has the power to transcend your physical being and take you up just a little bit.

I call it "being interrupted by success." We had done The Soft Bulletin, which came out in 1999, and we knew we that were gonna make another record before too long. But in between this, we were still in this mode of kind of just - not re-creating what we could be, but kind of doing different things. For the longest time in the Flaming Lips we were like, "Make a record, go on tour. Come back, make another record," and you know, I think, frankly, we were kind of like, "There's more to life than just recording records and going on tour."

I got very lucky that some of the things that I wanted to work did work. Not because I knew what I was doing, just through dumb luck, it just looked beautiful and sounded great and captured some magical mood. And you just have to hope that you get lucky when you do big things like making a movie, or something.