“I did it when I was young, and some of the music was OK, but it wasn’t great.”

I’m selling more records on my own than I did on major labels.

At a major label you can start to feel that you’re working for them, and that any work you do, you’re never going to see any benefit.

It’s funny, because my last record was a lot about isolation and people living in separate worlds that other people can’t even understand, which drug addiction is the perfect negative example of.

It’s not easy in this phosphorescent gloom telling waking dreams apart anyhow.

It’s more important for me to have a good record with good music and be part of a movie that’s good and where the music is used in a really great way. That’s the important thing. The other stuff you want to say about it, I don’t care.

I wanted to try to write songs on the piano to get a different flavor.

I suppose I should be happy to be misread; better be that than some of the other things I have become.

But I can’t confront the doubts I have. I can’t admit that maybe the past was bad, and so, for the sake of momentum I’m condemning the future to death so it can match the past.

All the perfect drugs and superheroes wouldn’t be enough to bring me back to zero.

It’s easier to describe that shame, that horrible feeling of not being able to control your own life.

For me, there’s a fine line between telling a story that’s fictional with lots of details and then removing yourself too much from it, so it’s bloodless, a little too fictional.

Clearly in this business you have to contend with a lot of that.

Nightly you retrace your steps again to return to the scene of the crime. It’s uncanny how you hover in the air of the wreckage that you left behind.

You know what, the drummer is my manager. He’s busy. And I’m busy. I don’t need the dough, though. But having said that, there’s a limit to how much bad music I wanna play.

In the ’70s, everybody thought drugs were just good times. People didn’t really know about drug addiction, or that such a thing existed.

I don’t envy anybody trying to start a career right. There really is no music business left, in a lot of ways.

It’s never OK to lose a game.

Bayern want a decade of success like Barca. That’s OK if you have the money because it increases the possibility of success. But it’s not guaranteed.

I was always the one asking everybody else if they were O.K. I never talked about my problems.

I’m not going to get somewhere and say, ‘OK, I’m done.’ Success is never final; I’ll just keep on going.

At my home in the southwest of France, I grow oak, hazel, and lemon trees in my backyard.

Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.

I suppose I had my rock star fantasies while I was singing into my hairbrush in the bathroom mirror, but I never really consciously said, ‘OK, this is what I’m going to do for a living and I’m going to be Weird Al.’

So most of us human beings have a very deep underlying conditioning that says that just to be who we are is not OK…….