Eating good things and being around people who are happy - you want to be influenced by the world because it has so many cool things about it, but it also has a bunch of bad things about it. Being around people who are happy and people who are creative, that's what you do if you're lucky in your life.

Try to be happy within the context of the life we are actually living. Happiness is not a situation to be longed for or a convergence of lucky happenstance. Through the power of our own minds, we can help ourselves.

As you get older, you accept that there are some tunnels that don't have any light in them, but you go down them anyway.

It is comforting to know that there is at least one place where we can go and be confident that we will find an audience thirsting to find new music. Paste Magazine is that place. It's loss would create a very large black hole.

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.

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."

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.