Moby quotes:

If Nirvana had remained a small, underground punk rock band, Kurt Cobain would still be alive. And he'd probably be living in Seattle, getting kind of fat and balding, be relatively happy and producing records for other people.

As a New Yorker you can't help but be proud of the fact that so much music and culture started here. Punk rock, jazz, hip-hop and house music started here, George Gershwin debuted 'Rhapsody in Blue' here; the Velvet Underground are from New York.

Most artists, you know, you spend their entire lives learning how to play music and write songs, and they don't really know how the music business works.

I believe that the role of limited government should be looking after the needs of veterans, the elderly, children and those institutions that improve the quality of life for struggling families - I don't believe that government should bend to serve the needs of subsidized multi-national corporations and entitled billionaires.

The good thing about not being drop-dead gorgeous is that as time passes, I don't have much to worry about. I have friends who are actors and every day they look in the mirror with trepidation.

I have no patience for anyone who thinks they've figured things out, no patience for people who think they're right at the expense of everyone else. The world is too connected and too complicated to conform to any of our rigid ideas of what it should be like.

Many of my friends back in New York and elsewhere have a glib or dismissive attitude toward Los Angeles. It's a place of strip malls and traffic and not much else, in their opinion.

I met Elton John at an Interview dinner, and we just sort of became friends. He's got such a wicked sense of humor.

Being a vegan is pretty easy these days, as almost every town and city has health food stores and vegetarian-friendly restaurants.

I wasn't raised Catholic; I just really like the image of a neutral and benign Mary floating around somewhere, being nice to people.

I feel like once the song is done, you put it out there and if people want to do bizarre remixes, if people want to make strange videos, great. You know, like chaos theory applied to the music business.

That is not all I need. I need dogs. A house filled with dogs and a smart, funny, kind, loving girlfriend or wife.

It seems so antithetical to the teachings of Christ to proclaim your faith in public. I mean, of course you're not supposed to hide your light under a bushel.

My uncle is from Argentina, so I grew up hearing Spanish. My Spanish isn't very good, but my pronunciation isn't terrible.

Mainly I'm a vegan because I like animals, and I don't want to be involved in their suffering. Also, it's better for my health and for the environment.

When I was growing up, albums were my closest friends, as sad as that may sound - Joy Division's 'Closer,' or Echo and the Bunnymen's 'Heaven Up Here'... I had a more intimate relationship with those records than I did with most of the people in my life.

If you look at someone like Joe Strummer or John Lennon, when you heard their music you knew that they wrote it and they cared about it.

There are a lot of great animal rights organizations who save dogs and save cats, but the Humane Society is actually really good at working with Congress and getting legislation actually passed.

Every single day the world seems like it is on the brink of falling apart. But then I look outside my window, and things look about the same as they did a week ago. It's almost a form of cognitive dissonance.

There are a lot of people in the animal rights movement who can be very passionate and aggressive, and I applaud people's passion, but when people are judgmental and aggressive, all you end up doing is getting other people to turn away in irritation. To change people's minds, you have to respect the people you're talking to.

I won't complain about touring, because I really do believe that a public-figure musician complaining about being a public-figure musician is just absurd. Like, 'Boo hoo hoo! I have to stand on stage and people pay attention to me!'

I buy things with the best of intention of living in them and then life intercedes.

A great song is a great song, whether it's on vinyl or CD or cassette or reel to reel or mp3. Then again, that might be an overly optimistic view, but I do think that great music will transcend the medium in which it is delivered.

It's enshrined in our Constitution that an individual has a right to release information and disseminate information that makes the powers that be uncomfortable.

As people continue to do more and buy more over the Internet, continue to meet people over the Internet, connection speeds are going to get faster, and the Internet is just going to become an even more integral part of people's lives.

I think that Eminem is very talented and remarkably bright, and I actually do like a lot of his music.

If you and I become vegans, the global consequences aren't going to be that much. But if we can get a few hundred million people to become a little more aware and cut back on their animal consumption, the consequences will be great.

I love the idea of making records that people can use, records that have a sense of utility.

A part of me wants to sort of try and sound cool and feed this myth that I'm some sort of glamorous lothario, but I was raised by women - my mother and her mother and my aunts - and as a result, most of my friends have always been women.

More often than not, whenever gossip has been written about me, the gossip is more interesting than the reality. I know some public figures hate gossip, but personally I like it because it makes my life sound more glamorous and interesting than it really is.

There are a lot of musicians who are still desperately trying to pretend that it's 1998 and by having a huge marketing campaign, they somehow believe that they can sell 10 million records. That's delusional. No one sells 10 million records. The days of musicians getting rich off of selling records are done.

Scotland is one of my favourite places to perform: it's really something special. Scottish audiences are just so enthusiastic; their approach to dance music just feels similar to my own somehow.

I may be a lifelong 'downtowner,' but Central Park really is the most amazing and the most beautiful part of New York City.

I don't think there's anything wrong with not knowing how to play an instrument, but the rise of the non-musical producer has done away with musicianship and focused attention purely on the song's hook.

When I went to university, I was a philosophy major, but because I'm not very bright I chose to study philosophy at a performing arts school, maybe because the philosophy program there wasn't too rigorous or challenging.

When I was growing up, I was the most pretentious person I have ever met. I only read obscure books and watched obscure movies and only listened to obscure music.

I'm perfectly happy for my videos to be on YouTube, whether I'm getting paid for them or not. If they're on YouTube, people will see them. If for some reason my videos get taken down from YouTube, well, I apologize. If it was up to me they'd all be up there and they'd all be free.

The term 'renaissance man' is always bandied about. I don't think that applies to me. You think about Leonardo da Vinci, and he was a painter and a physicist and an architect, and that is a true renaissance man.

For years, my mom dated a man who was really active in the Baptist church in the town next to the town I grew up in, and so he used to drag me to these Baptist church services that lasted forever. I remember that I didn't like the church services, but I really liked the music.

I thought that my life would be spent working in a bookstore, teaching community college, and making music in my spare time that no one would be willing to listen to.

People assume that somehow fame and wealth will keep mortality at bay.

I think the word 'blog' is an ugly word. I just don't know why people can't use the word 'journal.'

I feel compelled to make art that on one hand reflects and sometimes almost creates like a sense of comfort when confronted with the strangeness of the world.

When public figures think they can open a business even though they've got no business experience, it's a bad idea.

In the long, nonillustrious history of white people pilfering African American culture, have I just perpetrated that? I'm motivated by a love for the music and by a love of the performances, and I really hope I haven't done anything bad.

David Lynch is my friend, and I love his movies and his art and his music. Few things make me happier than working with him.

I can't think of any musician or producer who has influenced me more than Brian Eno. From when he was in Roxy Music, producing Devo, the Talking Heads and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

I don't have children, but I imagine if parents are really pushed on the subject, they probably have favorite children.

One of the nice things about licensing music to movies or advertisements is you can reach a lot of people who normally wouldn't hear music.

But on a utilitarian level, I realize that to try to accomplish the greatest good for the greatest number of people, sometimes we have to become salesmen for what we believe, and part of being a salesman is being effective.

I think a lot of self-importance is a product of fear. And fear, living in sort of an un-self-examined fear-based life, tends to lead to narcissism and self-importance.

If there is true evil in the world - it is Republican conservatives.

In 1991 I did an interview wherein I described myself as a 'teetotal Christian,' which was an exaggeration, although I do like tea and Christ.

When I say, 'I love Christ and love the teachings of Christ,' I mean that in the most simple and naive way. I'm not saying I'm right.

It's a very strange phenomenon being hated by people you've never met. Some journalists just seem to hate me and everything I do, and it's disconcerting because I've never met this person.

I need an audience way more than an audience needs me.

The average life expectancy of a celebrity is 20 years less than someone working in a coal mine.

For better or worse, I'm interested in just about everything: every different type of music I can imagine. I can never see a reason to choose just one type of music at the exclusion of everything else. Different types of music are capable of being rewarding in different kinds of ways.

The truth is that genetics has robbed me of hair. But it's not interesting to blame genetics.

If someone is cynical and doesn't vote and ends up with a crummy job in a crummy country with a decimated environment, they only have themselves to blame.

What fascinates me about addiction and obsessive behavior is that people would choose an altered state of consciousness that's toxic and ostensibly destroys most aspects of your normal life, because for a brief moment you feel okay.

Musically, New York is a big influence on me. Walk down the street for five minutes and you'll hear homeless punk rockers, people playing Caribbean music and reggae, sacred Islamic music and Latino music, so many different types of music.

The good thing about working alone is I get a lot done and I can experiment more. The bad thing is I miss out on the gregarious, social way that most musicians work.

Shaving your head is acceptable. It's when you start wearing toupees and brushing your hair over that things go wrong.

I've made records that everyone has hated and I've loved, and made records that everyone has loved and I've deemed, at best, mediocre.

At the risk of sounding pedestrian, I'll be completely honest: the first thing I do in the morning is check Google News, partially because it seems sort of random and unbiased and partially because I tend to stay in hotels that don't necessarily have the fastest Internet connections.

There might be a lot of difference between Republicans and Democrats on key social issues like women's rights and health care. But when it comes to taking corporate cash, they're pretty much the same beast.

In a perfect world, I would be 6-foot-3 and have a perfect head of hair and look like Orlando Bloom.

Have I dated a supermodel? Of course not. I'd look ridiculous.

I know, in my heart of hearts, I don't do things for money.

If you care about women's rights, you can't not vote.

NASA is an utterly fascinating place, and the fact that the buildings look so anonymous almost makes it more fascinating. You walk by a generic office-park-looking building, and you have no idea what's going on inside.

When I was nine years old, I started playing guitar, and I took classical guitar lessons and studied music theory. And played jazz for a while. And then when I was around fourteen years old, I discovered punk rock. And so I then tried to unlearn everything I had learned in classical music and jazz so I could play in punk rock bands.

I find myself for whatever reason unable to live in the apartment I renovate and have to sell.

A lot of times good, pristine recordings prevent the listener from getting emotionally involved in the music.

I love it when celebrities fall apart.

Dogs have boundless enthusiasm but no sense of shame. I should have a dog as a life coach."

Musically, New York is a big influence on me. Walk down the street for five minutes and you'll hear homeless punk rockers, people playing Caribbean music and reggae, sacred Islamic music and Latino music, so many different types of music."

I truly don't judge other people's actions. But I think that factory farming is an abomination.

I stopped drinking and realised New York still has a lot of charm, but it has become so bourgeois and affluent - and I can't really complain because I'm sort of bourgeois and affluent myself, but I like living in a place where artists and musicians and writers can actually pay the rent.

I see 'Ahab's Wife' as offering an alternative vision to

If the entire world decided to become vegan tomorrow, a whole host of the world's problems would disappear overnight. Climate change would decrease by 25 percent, deforestation would cease, rainforests would be preserved, our water- and air-quality would increase, life-expectancy rates would increase, and our rates of cancer would plummet, so certainly, with that one action of becoming vegan you are quite effectively making the world a better place.

I can spend years studying and being in therapy and having a very analytic spiritual meditation practice, but without the emotional component, without the softening that comes with love and vulnerability, everything else I do is really just surface.

My reason for becoming a vegetarian was simple: I loved (and love) animals

I've been an animal rights activist and a vegan for 28 years. The entire time, I've asked myself: How do I best advance an animal rights agenda?

I like my coffee like I like my romantic partners: cold and bitter and prone to giving me anxiety attacks.

Everyone feels awkward, everyone feels uncomfortable, everyone gets older, everyone gets lonely, everyone gets sick, everyone eventually dies. You're at the Aspen Ideas Fest, and you have these really smart, really accomplished people who pretend like they've somehow figured out a way to bypass the human condition. We live in this culture where there are so many things that want us to pretend that we're not truly human.

I'm not sure how healthy it is to shoot police helicopters with bazookas.

I like the humility that comes from being hated. Hopefully some humility and compassion comes out of that.

I taught Bible Study, and there was period where I thought all of my beliefs were right, and everybody who disagreed with me was wrong.

I have nothing against bombastic music, but when it comes to making albums, I'd prefer to make music that has a sort of vulnerable subtlety to it.

When playing big festivals, I tend to play big, over the top techno tracks, like hands in the air songs that make sense being played in front of 30,000 people. I steer away from subtlety in the interests of big bombastic dance music.

What sounds good on the radio is really loud kick drums and loud snare drums, when everything's bombastic and in your face. It's the equivalent of a houseguest who screams all the time.

When I was in my twenties, I thought I was bulletproof.

Doing interviews and touring are two ways that I can try to bring my music to people. It can be tiring, but it's better than working at Burger King.

Why can't a democrat get fired up about protecting the environment and enacting gun control legislation just as right wing republicans get fired up about making sure that children have access to assault weapons and banning 'the catcher in the rye' and 'harry potter'?

When I was growing up, I fetishised New York City. It was the land of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, it was where Leonard Cohen wrote 'Chelsea Hotel', it was CBGBs and all the punk rock clubs. Artists and musicians lived there, and it was cheap and dangerous.

That softness around your eyes, a softness in your face. Almost the way you feel when you're about to start crying. That, to me, is love. It can be romantic love, it can be friendship love, it can be family love, it can be love for a chipmunk. It can be love for anything.

I'm envious of people who can sleep as long as they want. I have the circadian rhythm of a farmer.

For example, you can go on all the pro-life chat rooms and say you're an outraged right-wing voter and that you know that George Bush drove an ex-girlfriend to an abortion clinic and paid for her to get an abortion.Then you go to an anti-immigration website chat room and ask, "What's all this about George Bush proposing amnesty for illegal aliens?

Sometimes I love the marriage of art and commerce; I love Donna Summer; I like the Rolling Stones.

You can't find an uglier urban environment than the centre of Hollywood, but then you go to Griffith Park, you go to the beach, you go to the mountains, and it's rural. I live up in the Hollywood Hills and I have frogs, owls, coyotes, mountain lions - but I'm ten minutes from the centre of the city.

To truly live a creative life means that you will need to experiment in as many different fields as possible.

There is a dysfunctional strangeness to Los Angeles that doesn't exist in any other western city. The roads are crumbling, no-one knows what they're doing, the city government barely works.

When I was a drunk, New York was the greatest place in the world. You walk everywhere, everything is open until four in the morning, and people go to New York looking for debauchery.

Biologically we're all the same. We all get sad, we all get happy, and we all die. Anyone who pretends that that's not the case is either a sociopath or utterly delusional.

The people who get more fame, who get more money, more often than not they are miserable, insecure and on anti-depressants. It's strange that everyone keeps buying into this idea that more success is good, that more fame is good, that more money is good. Yet, we look at the people who have more success, more fame, more money and they're miserable.

And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves, and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.

I've been making electronic music for twenty some odd years but, because I grew up playing in punk rock bands, when I started touring, I thought in order to be a viable touring musician I had to do it with a band. I would DJ or tour with a full rock band.

The worst case scenario is you really like someone's work, then you meet them and they're a self-involved, entitled douchebag.

A few years ago, before I stopped drinking, I was feeling very sorry for myself and very drunk, and I Googled 'Moby Sucks'. In less than one second something like 20 million responses came up... yeah, there has been a lot of loathing directed towards me, and it used to drive me crazy.

There's an aesthetic theme, which is cities at two o'clock in the morning. Not cities packed with people going out to clubs and dancing but desolate, empty streets. It's off-putting but there's a strange comfort to it as well, that desolate urban environment.

Britney [Spears]'s actually kind of like a broken-down shell of a human being, that's what makes her so endearing and compelling.

My mother and I were on welfare and food stamps until I was 18, so I've always had this ethos of, like, 'try and make a little bit of money now because you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow.'

There are viable (and usually better) alternatives to the use of animals for food, sport, clothing, & experimentation. I beg you to discontinue any actions that might cause or condone animal torture, abuse, or destruction.

In the past I've had public feuds with people, and I have really not benefited from any of them. The feud with Eminem did kind of torpedo my career in the United States, but it also introduced me to Middle America in a way I never could have conceived of.

When I was fifteen years old, the only distinction in music my friends and I made was [that] there's music made by people with short hair and music made by people with long hair.

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed; and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

One time I was doing an interview for a gay magazine and halfway through the journalist found out I wasn't gay. He said, 'Sorry, I can't continue the interview.' Because they only had gay public figures in their magazine. I felt so crestfallen. I wanted to tell him: but I play fundraisers for gay marriage! I'd rather my kids were gay than straight!'

So in 1987 I gave up all animal products and became a vegan. Simply so that I could eat and live in accordance with my beliefs that animals have their own lives, that they're entitled to their own lives and that contributing to animal suffering is something that I don't want to be a part of.