Top 455 Quotes & Sayings by Moby - Page 6

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.

Everyone feels awkward, everyone feels uncomfortable, everyone gets older, everyone gets lonely, everyone gets sick, everyone eventually dies.

The moment that you impose your will on another person or animal, that's when we are allowed to say you have committed an ethical breach.

I like being vegan, I think it's good for my health.

Old people go to the polls because they can't get erections, young people stay home, do drugs and have sex.

LA is such a crumbling mess of a city. Basically in all my years of travelling, I haven't found another city in the western world that interest me as much as Los Angeles - which might sound like heresy, but most cities, history has already happened and the people living there are sort of living on the bones of the thousand years of history that's already happened there. Whereas LA is always reinventing itself.

When I was growing up I was an atheist, then an agnostic, and then I had a good eight or ten years of being quite a serious Christian.

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

All of us little bald white guys wearing glasses kind of look the same.

To paraphrase Paul from the New Testament, he has a great soliloquy about love, where he's basically saying, if I've figured out the secrets of the universe but I don't have love, figuring out the secrets of universe means nothing.

I have no perspective as regards my work. One reason I put out records and books is people respond to it, and it enables you to actually see the work more clearly. It's a form of therapy for me. Sometimes abusive therapy.

When I dj at big venues I try to play tracks that I would want to hear if I were e'd up in a field with 50,000 other people.

I’ve never seen the need to choose one type of music at the exclusion of another. That would feel kind of sad and arbitrary.

I will be very sad when global warming and toxins kill off all the toads and frogs and salamanders. Here's hoping we, as humans, figure out a way to be less stupid.

I would drink and drink and then at 3 o'clock in the morning take anything that was put in front of me. And I'd sometimes be disappointed when conventional things were put in front of me. Like, I'd do a line of something and be disappointed to find it was just cocaine.

For me my biggest inspiration is trying to make music that effects me as much as the music made by my heroes.

I find the fact that so few people buy albums to be strangely emancipating. There's absolutely no reason for 99% of musicians making albums to think about actually selling albums. So as a musician you can just make an album for the love of making albums.

I always just made music that resonates with me emotionally.

I saw people around me who were falling deeper and deeper into alcoholism and substance abuse. It's seductive because alcohol is amazing and drugs are amazing, they work so well.

The moment somebody becomes famous, 15 years gets knocked off their life. They're gonna get divorced a few times, they're gonna be addicted to things, they're gonna be in therapy.

At 3 o'clock in the morning on tour when you're sober is a lot less fun than 3 a.m. when you're drunk in a bar or in a nightclub. But having said that, 9 in the morning on tour sober is immeasurably better than 9 a.m. on tour when you're hung over and feeling like death.

God took his chosen people and we are what's left. He looked at what's left and thought: I could kill you all, but let's see what happens. A little social experiment.

God has taken his chosen people, the problem being you are the only non-chosen person.

Should the progressives in Germany in the 30s have tolerated the National Socialists? Of course they shouldn't have.

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.

The idea of feeling old is much more the worry of a slightly younger person. When you are getting old, that becomes - psssh - completely secondary to the absolute understanding of how short your life is.

To quote Homer Simpson, alcohol is the cause and solution to all of life's problems. I don't think there's anything wrong with drinking and drug use, if people can do it and not hurt themselves. But it got to the point where I was really hurting myself.

I'm offended by the is-ought fallacy, which has been used to justify slavery, women not being allowed to vote, children working in factories.

Ketamine's such a waste of time drug. All you do when you're on ketamine is go: 'Oh, I'm on drugs. I don't feel good, I don't feel bad, I'm just on drugs...'

I'm sure most people have this experience: when you're young you drink, you do drugs, you stay up late, and there are no consequences.

I feel like someone who's meditating could possibly benefit their meditation practice and their well-being just by sitting down and thinking about things that they love for ten minutes.

I was trying to convince myself I could learn to be gay - but no. That's one of my great regrets.

The solution probably doesn't look like the problem. If we have this propensity to worry, to be anxious, to be depressed, to be angry - focusing on the worry, anxiety, depression, and anger? Probably not gonna be the solution.

I'm not trying to look for pity or sympathy. I was just surprised that so many people in the world of entertainment seemed to be okay with misogyny and homophobia as long as they were profiting from it.

I like to quote Homer Simpson: 'I'm like a chocoholic except for alcohol.' I come from a long line of alcoholics. It's funny because when I first started making records, I was at the tail end of a period of sobriety, so I somehow got this reputation as Captain Sober.

I've been friends with madonna for ever. In fact she was at my 3rd solo performance in 1990, and there were only 10 people in the audience.

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 love that vinyl is actually growing in popularity, and that there are so many great record stores.

When I was very young, I played in a punk-rock band, but I also studied music theory and classical music.

I went to Columbia University because they were doing a study on people who suffered from panic attacks, and because I suffered from panic attacks my whole life, I decided to be a part of it. They had this questionnaire where they asked, How many units of alcohol do you have in a month? The top answer was 40 or more, and I got really scared because I was having on average 60 or 70 drinks a week. And I realized that that was a bad sign.

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

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

Under no circumstances do I ever want to see any part of me having sex! I wouldn't want to see video tape, pictures, in the mirror, nothing.

My records are fairly quiet and my dj sets are really loud. And then the live shows are like a robot soul revue. So i understand people's confusion.

What I love about making albums in the 21st century is that so few people buy albums! I can make an album without any commercial concerns whatsoever.

If you look at the history of popular music, the most successful musicians have started out being really marginal and esoteric. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Madonna. Prince. Bruce Springsteen. Fleetwood Mac. David Bowie. Public Enemy. Nirvana.

An artist in 2014 who is thinking about album sales is either sadly deluded or has to make so many commercial compromises that it sort of takes the joy out of making music.

I know it's simple, but my main inspiration is just my love of music. I know that sounds overly naive. But it's true.

Since I stopped drinking my love life has taken a really serious hit. Romantic encounters that seemed like a really good idea at three o'clock in the morning on the Lower East Side? Less so in sobriety.

I think the ideal job in that alternative universe would be to lead whitewater rafting trips through the Grand Canyon. So maybe I'd be a guy leading whitewater rafting trips at the Grand Canyon. Or maybe a professional skydiver.

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.

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.

I think it'd be great if Prince made an album of just romantic, slow ballads.

We live in this culture where there are so many things that want us to pretend that we’re not truly human. That we can be exempt from the human condition, either through intelligence or accomplishment or success or humor. Bu 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.

If I had to label myself now, I'd call myself a Taoist-Christian-agnostic quantum mechanic.

I remember I went to Berlin right after the Wall came down. I first went to East Berlin, and all the buildings were old and falling down, and now when you go back to Berlin, you know you're in the East because all the buildings are brand new and very tall.

I've experienced tons of failure. I've been making music for 30 years, and I'd say failure and success have happened in equal measure.

Success usually breeds a degree of hubris.

Oftentimes things that seem really difficult and traumatic in the short term seem a lot less difficult and traumatic in the long term.

Because I've been that drunk person in the club so many thousands of times, when I'm in an environment where people are drunk or on drugs, I certainly don't judge them. Because it's almost a given that for much of my life I've been way more messed up than them.