I'm pouring my guts out so they can feel like your guts at the same time.

Your life, unfortunately - and I mean this - your life is built on when love dies. There's a lot of love in your life that will simply die. And you wish that you died with it, you know? But you don't. And you go, oh, well, here I am.

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."

We wish that we could take magic drugs, play around all day, read, and do nothing strenuous, and be the smartest, happiest people in the world. The truth is, it's all about sweat.

Most artists I run into aren't that thrilled with what they do anyway. They are glad to have different versions out there to see which one the audience likes the best.

The things that affect you most deeply - the things that will destroy you if you don't sing about them - are the things that you often end up singing about. It's really just about saying those things that everybody thinks but no one will say and making a connection by uncovering these diamonds that are inside of all of us that no one wants to tell each other about.

I do think there is a segment of people in Oklahoma that really do love the Flaming Lips and love this other idea of what someone from Oklahoma could be like. I've sort of become the spokesperson for this "other person" who could come from Oklahoma.