I would like to leave the world a better place than when I entered it. I would hope that by the time I die I could have learned from the years of living and hand something down.
Over time, naturally, you lose your innocence from gaining knowledge. You can't be innocent forever, but there's something in innocence you need to regain to be creative.
When people ask me for playlists, I always put in 'Moonlight Sonata' because it is my favorite song. I play it all the time.
I actually use women's perfume - I have since I was a kid. It's called Anais Anais, from Rachael. It smells like a beautiful woman and a bouquet of flowers. I use that and Right Guard deodorant.
I think that's one of the greatest gifts you get if you're successful at something like music or film or photography - any of the arts - you can sit there and think. It's so much fun to sit there and think and wonder about the world and the universe.
Carl Sagan's 'Pale Blue Dot' is where I got the title 'Momentary Masters.'
When you write songs, you're writing little bits here, little bits there.
The way the press works, people don't like to review or talk about EPs. It's considered, 'Why don't you just wait for the record?' But for someone who's creating, and the audience, they can get material quicker. I almost feel like putting out a few songs every couple months might be better than putting out an album every year or two.
Change isn't a scary thing. It's constant and inevitable.
Two people happy with themselves can be exceptionally happy together.
The Strokes, you bond when you're 18, and you're friends. The feeling's different. When all of us get into a room, we feel like the same people from before. We weren't anybody; we were just hanging out. It's hard to understand if you're not in a band. You're one-fifth.
When someone's really good at encapsulating human emotion and putting it out in a form that can reach a variety of people, that's going to have a big effect when he's no longer there.
Egon Schiele is my favorite painter. There's just something about art - photography, painting, music, plays - whatever you see, sometimes there's a gut reaction that's more important or more visceral than what your brain is thinking about. You can't explain that reaction. It's like what happens when you fall in love.
You know when you become friends with someone, you don't even remember? When you weren't friends? You're just kinda like, 'When were we not friends? When I met you, weren't we just already friends?' I have the same thing with the Strokes guys.
I've got my advanced scuba diving license. I'm playing tennis and exercising. I ride my bike everywhere. I've been finding new things. I've been more creative in music and doing different videos. And just meeting different people and being around and present. I'm wonderful when I'm just on nothing.
Rock and roll's relatively new, in the sense of the Fifties, Sixties, right? They invented the first sort of rock stars, and they took it to excess, and then the excess became bitter, tormented. Then it became okay to succeed.
I feel like I can be a frontman; I feel like I have good songs.
Little moments of excitement shape the sound of a record. You don't have anything, and then you start to have little parts that give you the energy to move forward because you start to see something.
I feel like my strength is surrounding myself with people who have an ear for things, and then they play it for me. I'm always looking; my ear is always open.
There are different people who got me into music, but what I liked about Beethoven is that even when I didn't understand it or it was too long, there's still something about it that drove me to it. Then it got me excited about actually learning music, like a theory of it.
