John Maus quotes:

With writing music, as a general rule I'm looking for something that surprises me, that doesn't fall within what's easy for me.

There's love and there's romantic love. The Greeks had different words for different kinds of love. And we just got "love." I don't know what you would call the other kinds - maybe brotherly love, Christian love, the love of Saint Francis, love of everyone and everything. Then there's romantic love, which, by and large, is a pain in the ass, a kind of trauma.

I don't mean to romanticise the struggle, that leads to all kinds of terrible violence and absurdities that are even worse than the perverse immediate gratification.

I have no idea what the hell is going on in the world, in my life, in what anything means, or what I'm supposed to do.

Anytime you can muster the fury to actually write in the face of the impossibility of writing, that's an achievement.

The man believes the woman's got the hidden secret. That's a rare thing. You meet lots of people, and they're all deserved of love, of course, but romantic love involves some kind of supplement: she has the secret. That's what's desired.

I'm against eating a human being alive - I don't do it. Somebody might make cannibalism jokes and laugh it off like it's nothing. I don't agree with that. I want to proclaim a rejection of cannibalism.

It's a very teenage idea - this idea that thought is ruined when we give over to television shows and glossy magazines and what they are telling us to do. The alternative, I believe, in is pitiless censorship. Because we owe each other the best effort we can to see one another without that mediation.

Musical acts that feign enthusiasm for what they're doing the guitarist who jumps up and down, like it's choreographed are so transparently vacuous.

I'm steeped in aesthetic theory, so I tend to bring in my own amateurish way of baring a little bit - when, in practice, I'm not thinking about that when I'm working over the keyboard, or musing over musical ideas in my head. But when discussing it, we want to have some new thought about this new music.

There's really not much in life that's as violent or traumatic as an encounter with somebody who really surprises you and opens up that strange dynamic that's involved in romantic love.

It seems to me that the best work I've done - and maybe this is something other people can identify with - was because it was an end in itself. It was something other than making ends meet, it was an escape from all that.

I'm sure a handful of people can relate to that experience of having some kind of romantic encounter - the event of love - which they just can't shake. They take it with them, despite their own desire, and it continually haunts them, and there's nothing to be done about it. That's a true rarity.

Various people have put forth that love is the scene of two, that it's not about unity, it's about two absolutely disjunct positions encountering each other. So even with something like sex you could never become one.

Maybe this is blasphemy to say, but I feel like music is not meant to be something that earning your keep depends on because it cheapens it and it will force you into making decisions in the interest of earning your keep, as opposed to the interest of the thing itself.

I would never want to kill a human being.

It's so important what you're doing in your life. It's tremendously important to the work, and no aesthetic theories take that into account.

In all the music I've done, what I'm really interested in above all else, and I'm not sure it's what one should be interested in, is the kind of - you know, people talk about work progressions, which doesn't really make sense with pop music because there is no progression, because there is no tonic, because there is no more tonality.

The categories of woman and man are too rigid. They're going to give way to new forces. They already have, to a degree, but for most of us, this drama held sway, and we assumed our positions.

I am definitely interested in soundtracks that one might associate with fantasy or sci-fi - they tend to be rich with musical ideas.

I really try as hard as I can on the show. If people can't see my face, if they can't see my sweat beads or at least that I'm struggling, that I'm not just pretending or going through the motions, then who can blame them for thinking that it's some kind of ridiculous piss-take?

In our culture, the Oedipal drama succeeds in making us assume either a male or female sexual position. Certainly this is an ancient construct that's rapidly coming apart.

In terms of love and romance, it just seems less and less like that's ever going to happen again, or be a possibility for me. I feel like I've irrevocably lost so much. You want the surprise, but it gets harder and harder to find, whether we're talking about romance, or somebody else's song, or your own song.