Mike Patton quotes:

Puffy's the only guy who's jealous. All drummers want to be singers. I think it's a myth that the singer needs to be the focus. Bands perpetuate that myth. With somebody like Sebastian Bach it makes sense. Look at him. He could be in an Avon ad.

I got one entire song from fortune cookies (Land of Sunshine). On another one, I took words from different Frank Sinatra songs and pasted them together. Another one, I was just driving around and there was a piece of paper on the ground, so I stole it.

Stan Slaughter is the thoroughbred of the environmental educators I've hired. Second place is not even close.

Trey Spruance didn't want to tour for ages. And Dean Menta has always been our guitar-roadie during Angel Dust, and I remember him playing fantastically during soundchecks. During each gig, he was watching from the side of the stage, seeing Big Jim play stuff that he could play better.

I learned what I could do with my voice on stages and because of the people that I was around. It wasn't me sitting in a room by myself. I didn't know what I was doing. I was figuring it out on the fly.

Any idiot, any stockbroker can get out there and live out a fantasy and pretend like he's playing music. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

I guess I'm getting to the age where a lot of other people my age have real jobs, and when they're hard-up they refer to an old-timer like me.

Diamanda Galás, the avant-weird performance artist... 'The devil's wife,' someone calls her. Faith No More loves Diamanda Galás...

I am no one to be a purist.

I don't know why, but there's a certain element of panic in writing lyrics that I'm not sure I enjoy. I don't write lyrics first, ever. I've never done that. So, in a sense, the lyrics are a bit of an afterthought - it's music first.

Quantitative methods are no more synonymous with objectivity than qualitative methods are synonymous with subjectivity.

The studio is my main compositional tool. And I used to be horrible in the studio. I didn't know any kind of technical stuff. But when you have something in your head, you've gotta figure out a way of executing it.

We just wanna be the happy bums that we are. That's all.

I lived in Italy for a number of years and I was really digging around trying to get my hands dirty, trying to learn about Italian music. And what I ended up gravitating towards was this stuff from the '50s and '60s and maybe early '70s, where there were these incredibly talented pop singers that weren't using pop bands.

I think that too many people think too much about my lyrics. I am more a person who works with the sound of a word than with its meaning. Often I just choose the words because of the rhythm not because of the meaning.

If a person wants to be atheistic it's his God-given right to be an atheist.

If someone were to hire me for a film they'd be getting a certain kind of package, that's for sure, a certain set of tools. But I would listen to the director.

I'm not a poet. I'm not up onstage to get something off my chest. I'm making musical statements, or, most of the time, musical questions for people to figure out, and I'm not going to get in the way of that.

Revenge is good. I think revenge is healthy too, and if you can use music in that way, a sort of therapeutic way for yourself, it can't do any harm. So if King (For A Day...Fool For A Lifetime) is angry in any way, it's angry in a random, chaotic, healthy way. Like the guy who goes into a building, shoots a bunch of holes in the wall and then leaves. He didn't kill anybody.

That's one of the great things about touring. It makes you machinelike in a way that you can re-create this music not only in the right way but even better than when it was conceived.

The song is based on a lot of observation and a lot of speculation. But in sort of a pointed way its kind of about Madonna...I think it was a particular time where I was being bombarded with her image on TV and in magazines and her whole schtick kind of speaks to me in that way...like she's going through some sort of problem. It seems she's getting a bit desperate.

When you start to kind of immerse yourself in that improvisation culture, you gotta be comfortable enough with your instrument to throw yourself into a really potentially dangerous situation.