Top 122 Quotes & Sayings by Mike Patton - Page 2

Things die for a reason, and in Bungle's case, it was a lot of reasons. It was great while it lasted but not something I'd go crawling back to.

I consciously did not want to put a sub-Mr. Bungle band on the map. I don't think the world needs that.

To me, finding sounds, or even recording, is a compositional process. The studio is kind of an instrument.

I create a guise or a band that I can operate within, and within each one of those bands, I've got an M.O. or a set of rules and parameters I can work within.

I don't actually read that much. I like movies a bit more. That's how I come up with ideas - by seeing things, hearing things, recycling things. Stealing things!

I like to have a few things going on at once. It feels natural.

My wife is Italian, and I lived there for six years.

If they're acting like a dog, sometimes you're forced to treat people like dogs.

I lived in Italy for quite a while and married an Italian woman. While there, I immersed myself in the complete culture: the music, art, literature, film, food, and history. It's easy to fall in love with. As a country, Italy does a good job of holding onto its rich traditions and culture. There's a real lack of embracing history in America.

I am constantly amazed at the musicians that are able to do the same thing over and over for 20 or more years. That would drive me absolutely insane.

Some artists can work under one guise, whether it's a name or a band or doing film soundtracks, put all of their ideas in one pot and move on. Me, I need to compartmentalize.

Orchestral musicians have a different approach than we do, and when I say 'we,' I mean musicians who don't know what they are doing.

My tools are musicians, effects, things like that.

I would like to do more film scoring, period. Whether it is a big film, a small film, or just anything. I feel like I have a lot to learn, and what better way to do it than on the job?

A lot of concerts are just too safe.

Most solo artists go out on their own and put their name on the record. I prefer to create little alternative universes.

I really don't want to put more than a couple of records out a year, and I think that makes sense - on an artistic level, but also for my label.

Everything with Peeping Tom is kind of a guessing game. It's constantly exhilarating but also exhausting.

I am perfectly aware of my position in commercial music.

I've got a comfortable home for my music where I can put out whatever the hell I want, and I feel like the slate is really clean, and I can get away with anything. It's a nice, free feeling.

The Faith No More stuff isn't about me. It was a band. Maybe that's where a lot of journalists got the wrong idea. You don't just pluck a song off a tree and put vocals on it.

I know that whatever I put out, whether people think it's pop or noise or whatever, it's always going to be some kind of a freak or mutation. It's not going to be anything pure that a lot of people will relate to. And that's fine.

You don't have to release everything you do. Some ideas need to just stay on the shelf.

When you're young and creative, you don't know how to channel all that creative energy, so sometimes it goes to the wrong places.

A lot of people assume that musicians are comrades by nature. It's cutthroat like anything else.

Acting is even stranger than I thought it would be.

Conducting is way over my head.

I'm a little tired of travelling the world, jaded as that may sound.

I got a PS3 and a PSP. The Wii looks fun.

All time faves would be 'Smash TV,' 'NHL Hockey,' 'Grand Theft Autos,' 'NBA Lives,' 'Sonic.'

'A Perfect Place' is character-driven. The director for that wanted a couple of identifiable themes with a bunch of variations. That is what I did. The director for 'The Solitude of Prime Numbers' did not want that at all.

If I'm not happy with the quality of something I'm working on, I won't put it out. That does not mean that others won't question the quality.

From what I've heard, videogame soundtracks - obviously, there's less budget and all of that - it just seems like game soundtracks are farmed out among friends. And it seems like more of an afterthought. It's a videogame. It's much more background.

My fear is getting stuck doing the same thing over and over.

Having my own label, I have to look at things in a realistic, bottom-line manner.

I don't like to use toilets - ever.

There are so many ideas that I have in my mind, of projects that I would love to tackle, people I would love to work with, genres I would love to experiment with, and sounds that don't fit any of my previous projects that I need to find a home for.

As an artist, I would never let myself get boxed in. I'm a human being, too, and like most humans, I have interest in many different types of music.

I've always been interested in film, so to get involved in any way in the genesis of making a film or music for a film is fascinating to me.

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.

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

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 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.

I am no one to be a purist.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The creative process for a musician is very different than for a filmmaker. I have an idea and I can pretty much execute it. As old as I am now and as long as I've been doing it, I can pretty much get it done in a week. While a filmmaker has a great idea that should be out tomorrow, but he has to go through this process of getting financing, then selling it, then casting. I've always been in awe of filmmakers and their patience in realizing their vision because I could never do that.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.