Moby Years Quotations

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.

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

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.

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.

I had an epiphany a few years ago where I was out at a celebrity party and it suddenly dawned on me that I had yet to meet a celebrity who is as smart and interesting as any of my friends.

I learned in the last few years that it's really unhappy and really unsustainable to try and base your well being on something as arbitrary as record sale and critical acclaim and the interests of the public. All of those things are so fickle. So my approach now to music is I want to make records that I love, and I hope that other people love them, then that's OK.

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.

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.

These new metal bands are going out, getting drunk and going to strip clubs, and they'll be doing the same in thirty years. There isn't even an interesting self-destructive quality to it . . . it's just dumb.

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.

I was in bar about 15 years ago, a relationship had ended badly, I was very drunk and I thought I would convince myself to try and be gay. Like, at one point I didn't like coffee, then I learned to like it.

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.

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 realized the universe is 15 billion years old and unspeakably complicated. I still love the teachings of Christ, but I also believe that the human condition prevents us from having any true objective knowledge and understanding of the universe.

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.

I've been having a midlife crisis since I was four years old.

I've been making music for thirty-six years and, you know, I'm still just as in love with working on music now as I was thirty-six years ago.