I want to be able to shoot laser beams out of my hands at people. That's the kind of stuff that you think all bands should do, but they don't, and I can't understand why most bands don't want to do it.

We love it when we make mistakes that are better than something you could think up.

We don't ever want to shut down and say, I'm afraid to go that far down the road because there's going to be pain. There'll be beauty, too, and if you stop here, you stop all that.

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."

To try to please people is an endless chasing of one's own tail. That's not very satisfying, so we do what we like and that satisfies us. When it does work out, its a bonus, really.

I'll accept the pain and the suffering, because I know that in that there's a lot of beauty, too.

The movie that we could've finished in 2001 would've sucked. The movie that we could've finished in 2002 would've just been a disaster, even into 2003, it would've been very cobbled together, amateuristic stuff. But as we went along, we really did stumble upon some accidental themes, and with the things you could do with computers, and all that sort of stuff just sort of really accelerated into where the stuff that we could do right here at my house became - you could almost do anything.