The Flaming Lips have been on Warner Bros. forever, and certainly everything I heard growing up was on a major label in some way, from the Cure to Radiohead to Bjork.

I think you have to want to be really famous. It's a lot easier to sabotage your career than to have a career to sabotage.

What I miss [about church] is being forced to be in community with people that aren't the same as me.

Major labels just lost their way. It's like the housing bubble. They lost a sense of the fundamentals.

Once I got to know what's been happening historically, it's pretty impossible to un-know it. Like right now, there's the outbreak of cholera in Haiti, and people see that as a news headline, but I know there's half a billion dollars of aid that one senator is putting a hold on, that the Red Cross has raised half a billion dollars but has only spent $200 million.

A lot of artists write about the same things their whole career.

Songwriting is reliant on inspiration, which ideally you don't have that much control over. Songs kind of half make themselves, and then you have to finish them.