Moby famous quotes

My reason for becoming a vegetarian was simple: I loved (and love) animals
-- Moby

#Animal #Simple #Becoming

Luckily almost no one buys music anymore, so selling music doesn't really affect any of my professional decisions.
-- Moby

#Decision #Selling

But when a man’s religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him.
-- Moby

#Men #Thinking #Earth

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.
-- Moby

#Wall #Fall #East

Could you look an animal in the eyes and say to it, 'My appetite is more important than your suffering'?
-- Moby

#Eye #Animal #Suffering

Success usually breeds a degree of hubris.
-- Moby

#Degrees #Hubris

To truly live a creative life means that you will need to experiment in as many different fields as possible.
-- Moby

#Mean #Creative #Fields

Sometimes I love the marriage of art and commerce; I love Donna Summer; I like the Rolling Stones.
-- Moby

#Summer #Art #Stones

So in 1987 I gave up all animal products and became a vegan. Simply so that I could eat and live in accordance with my beliefs that animals have their own lives, that they're entitled to their own lives and that contributing to animal suffering is something that I don't want to be a part of.
-- Moby

#Animal #Suffering #Want

I like singing, but it's certainly not my strong point.
-- Moby

#Strong #Singing

I won't complain about touring, because I really do believe that a public-figure musician complaining about being a public-figure musician is just absurd. Like, 'Boo hoo hoo! I have to stand on stage and people pay attention to me!'
-- Moby

#Believe #People #Complaining

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.
-- Moby

#Play #People #Track

There are a lot of musicians who are still desperately trying to pretend that it's 1998 and by having a huge marketing campaign, they somehow believe that they can sell 10 million records. That's delusional. No one sells 10 million records. The days of musicians getting rich off of selling records are done.
-- Moby

#Believe #Marketing #Trying

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.
-- Moby

#Inspiration #Simple #Sound

If I was a sex symbol, I would be getting laid a lot more than I am now.
-- Moby

#Sex #Would Be #Getting Laid

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

#Records #Growing #Vinyl

I feel like once the song is done, you put it out there and if people want to do bizarre remixes, if people want to make strange videos, great. You know, like chaos theory applied to the music business.
-- Moby

#Song #People #Video

Unfortunately I'm still straight. But who knows, life is complicated and maybe I'll wake up gay tomorrow! Here's hoping. And congratulations to everyone who lives in a place where they can marry the person they love, regardless of gender!
-- Moby

#Congratulations #Gay #Wake Up

There are viable (and usually better) alternatives to the use of animals for food, sport, clothing, & experimentation. I beg you to discontinue any actions that might cause or condone animal torture, abuse, or destruction.
-- Moby

#Sports #Animal #Abuse

I honestly haven't thought much about what to play and where, perhaps i should...it seems like most musicians are better at that than I am.
-- Moby

#Play #Musician #Should

It just seems like musicians want to sell a few records and put out a perfume line, and I think it's so sad that there are so many musicians who don't want to change the world.
-- Moby

#Change #Thinking #Records

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.
-- Moby

#Confusion #People #Soul

In a perfect world, I would be 6-foot-3 and have a perfect head of hair and look like Orlando Bloom.
-- Moby

#Feet #Hair #Perfect

My job of being a musician in a recording studio has nothing to do with being a musician being on tour performing.
-- Moby

#Jobs #Musician #Performing

For better or worse, I'm interested in just about everything: every different type of music I can imagine. I can never see a reason to choose just one type of music at the exclusion of everything else. Different types of music are capable of being rewarding in different kinds of ways.
-- Moby

#Way #Exclusion #Different

I believe that to knowingly commit actions that cause or condone suffering is reprehensible in the extreme. I call upon you to be compassionate and treat others as you want to be treated. If you don't want to be beaten, imprisoned, mutilated, killed or tortured then you shouldn't condone such behavior towards anyone, be they human or not.
-- Moby

#Believe #Suffering #Want

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.
-- Moby

#Average #People #Alcohol

Dogs have boundless enthusiasm but no sense of shame. I should have a dog as a life coach.
-- Moby

#Dog #Enthusiasm #Shame

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.
-- Moby

#Morning #Fun #Drunk

It's heartbreaking that so many hundreds of millions of people around the world are desperate for the right to vote, but here in America people stay home on election day.
-- Moby

#Home #America #People

Can't do any work with a rock star; you have to go through their lawyers and their agents and their managers and you have to book them hotel rooms. When you work with your friends, you just call them up and they come over and you record and then you go out to see a movie.
-- Moby

#Stars #Book #Rocks

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.
-- Moby

#Yawning #Years #Sea

I don't think of myself as a singer; I usually end up singing when I can't find anyone better to sing, or when I'm too lazy to find someone better.
-- Moby

#Thinking #Singing #Lazy

Most artists, you know, you spend their entire lives learning how to play music and write songs, and they don't really know how the music business works.
-- Moby

#Song #Writing #Artist

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.
-- Moby

#Years #Success And Failure #Equal

If I spend 100 days in a row making music there’s a chance nothing will come of it. But if I spend 100 days not making music it’s guaranteed that nothing will come of it. So keep working.
-- Moby

#Chance

In 1992 I was doing one of my first ever tours and I was in Heathrow airport and I saw these middle-aged musicians who had clearly been on tour for decades, and they all looked haggard and unhappy and unhealthy. I vowed to myself that I would never be that person. Flash forward 20 years and I found myself in Heathrow looking haggard and unhappy and unhealthy. I decided I would rather spend my time staying home working on music and making dinner with friends, instead of spending six months in a hotel in a state of depressing suspended adolescence.
-- Moby

#Depressing #Home #Airports

What fascinates me about addiction and obsessive behavior is that people would choose an altered state of consciousness that's toxic and ostensibly destroys most aspects of your normal life, because for a brief moment you feel okay.
-- Moby

#Addiction #People #Altered States Of Consciousness

I realized that I don't like touring. I'll never complain about it because no one wants to hear about a relatively successful musician complain about the hardships of staying in a hotel.
-- Moby

#Successful #Hardship #Want

One of the nice things about licensing music to movies or advertisements is you can reach a lot of people who normally wouldn't hear music.
-- Moby

#Nice #People #Nice Things

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.
-- Moby

#Drunk #Judging #People

My mother and I were on welfare and food stamps until I was 18, so I've always had this ethos of, like, 'try and make a little bit of money now because you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow.'
-- Moby

#Mother #Ethos #Trying

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

#Coffee #Giving #Anxiety

Musically, New York is a big influence on me. Walk down the street for five minutes and you'll hear homeless punk rockers, people playing Caribbean music and reggae, sacred Islamic music and Latino music, so many different types of music.
-- Moby

#New York #Islamic #People

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.
-- Moby

#Stupid #Toads #Frogs

Maybe it's a form of overcompensation, but whenever I've toured, I've always needed a huge performance component.
-- Moby

#Form #Needed #Performances

I honestly just love being in my studio working on music. That's all the inspiration I need. And I don't write with an end result in mind, I just write for the simple love of writing.
-- Moby

#Inspiration #Writing #Simple

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.
-- Moby

#People #Facts #Solo

There's no wrong way to meditate. And meditation should never be a difficult practice that leads to self criticism.
-- Moby

#Self #Practice #Meditation

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

#Inspiration #Hero #Trying

I love nyc. It's the city of my birth and probably the most amazing city on the planet.
-- Moby

#Cities #Nyc #Birth

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

#White #Glasses #Guy

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

#Police #Healthy #Bazookas

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.
-- Moby

#Rocks #Order #Years

When I was in my twenties, I thought I was bulletproof.
-- Moby

#Twenties #Bulletproof

When public figures think they can open a business even though they've got no business experience, it's a bad idea.
-- Moby

#Thinking #Ideas #Figures

Whenever I've had success, I never learn from it. Success usually breeds a degree of hubris. When you fail, that's when you learn.
-- Moby

#Degrees #Failing #Hubris

Whereas for me, touring tends to be a very strange and isolating experience.
-- Moby

#Strange #Touring

Who wakes up when they're worth £120million and says, 'I'm unhappy today but if only I had an extra £2million!'
-- Moby

#Unhappy #Today #Pounds

You could spend every waking moment online and still only experience one-trillionth of what's out there. I find that a little overwhelming.
-- Moby

#Littles #Waking #Moments

I have no patience for anyone who thinks they've figured things out, no patience for people who think they're right at the expense of everyone else. The world is too connected and too complicated to conform to any of our rigid ideas of what it should be like.
-- Moby

#Thinking #Ideas #People

We do all, myself included, we tend to hold ourselves to pretty low standards. But when it comes to judging public figures or politicians or people we've never met, we tend to hold people to very high standards, and, if we held ourselves to those standards, we'd always fall short.
-- Moby

#Fall #Judging #People

When I say, 'I love Christ and love the teachings of Christ,' I mean that in the most simple and naive way. I'm not saying I'm right.
-- Moby

#Teaching #Mean #Simple

Shaving your head is acceptable. It's when you start wearing toupees and brushing your hair over that things go wrong.
-- Moby

#Hair #Shaving

Punishing people for listening to music is exactly the wrong way to protect the music business.
-- Moby

#People #Listening #Way

Somehow, magically, I've become an electronic musician, and I have a recording studio that looks like the bridge of the Enterprise.
-- Moby

#Bridges #Looks #Musician

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

#Years #Average #Coal

The only sort of descriptive adjective or catch phrase for my music would be 'eclectic.'
-- Moby

#Adjectives #Phrases #Would Be

Some of the songs I've made, I'm really disappointed in how I mixed them.
-- Moby

#Song #Made #Disappointed

There are some public figures who are very private and almost hide behind their work. I try to be as open as possible.
-- Moby

#Trying #Figures #Behinds

There is a lot of music in the world that I love that does not always get the appropriate exposure.
-- Moby

#Doe #World #Exposure

There is nothing terribly wrong with my face, even if some of its parts aren't very inspiring.
-- Moby

#Faces #Very Inspiring

Traffic terrifies me.
-- Moby

#Traffic

I think there are two types of photographers, those who want to document the world and those who want to create their own world. I am more interested in documenting the world and presenting it to people with the question attached, 'Does this make any sense to you?'
-- Moby

#Thinking #Two #People

If Nirvana had remained a small, underground punk rock band, Kurt Cobain would still be alive. And he'd probably be living in Seattle, getting kind of fat and balding, be relatively happy and producing records for other people.
-- Moby

#Rocks #People #Band

The people who get more fame, who get more money, more often than not they are miserable, insecure and on anti-depressants. It's strange that everyone keeps buying into this idea that more success is good, that more fame is good, that more money is good. Yet, we look at the people who have more success, more fame, more money and they're miserable.
-- Moby

#Insecure #Ideas #People

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.
-- Moby

#Mom #Men #Years

I can't think of any musician or producer who has influenced me more than Brian Eno. From when he was in Roxy Music, producing Devo, the Talking Heads and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.
-- Moby

#Thinking #Talking #Musician

I don't think there's anything wrong with not knowing how to play an instrument, but the rise of the non-musical producer has done away with musicianship and focused attention purely on the song's hook.
-- Moby

#Song #Thinking #Play

I feel compelled to make art that on one hand reflects and sometimes almost creates like a sense of comfort when confronted with the strangeness of the world.
-- Moby

#Art #Hands #World

I joined Facebook purely so I could play online Scrabble. You have eight tiles instead of seven, so you tend to have higher scores. I'm somewhere between 400 and 500.
-- Moby

#Play #Eight #Tiles

I like noise. It's always puzzled me why one of the goals of contemporary recording is to get rid of noise and to eliminate any element of a performance.
-- Moby

#Goal #Noise #Elements

I love the fact that no one's ever bought my record because they were enamoured of the way I look. Maybe one person. There must be someone out there with compromised taste.
-- Moby

#Way #Taste #Facts

I love to be busy. I'm envious of people who are able to take their spare time and relax. All I like to do is work. Perhaps it's lingering Calvinist guilt?
-- Moby

#People #Guilt #Relax

I made a record in 1996 called 'Animal Rights' that was a very difficult, very dark punk-rock record. Of all the records I've made, it's my favorite one. It's also the one that got the worst reviews and sold the worst.
-- Moby

#Dark #Animal #Rights

For me, New York still ranks as the most beautiful and the most interesting city in the world. It is also the most varied in terms of the things it has to offer.
-- Moby

#Beautiful #New York #Cities

Every time you read an interview with a supermodel, they're always like, 'Oh, I was a such nerd.' I resent that a little bit. I was in the A/V club. I used to eat my lunch in a closet.
-- Moby

#Lunch #Nerd #Clubs

A great song is a great song, whether it's on vinyl or CD or cassette or reel to reel or mp3. Then again, that might be an overly optimistic view, but I do think that great music will transcend the medium in which it is delivered.
-- Moby

#Song #Optimistic #Thinking

A lot of people do talk about the demise of the album, but I still believe that if an artist tries hard to make a great album, people will buy it and listen to it as an album, rather than just a collection of random songs.
-- Moby

#Song #Believe #Artist

A part of me wants to sort of try and sound cool and feed this myth that I'm some sort of glamorous lothario, but I was raised by women - my mother and her mother and my aunts - and as a result, most of my friends have always been women.
-- Moby

#Mother #Aunt #Trying

As a New Yorker you can't help but be proud of the fact that so much music and culture started here. Punk rock, jazz, hip-hop and house music started here, George Gershwin debuted 'Rhapsody in Blue' here; the Velvet Underground are from New York.
-- Moby

#New York #Rocks #Blue

As music became more profitable in the 1990s, it seemed like it attracted a lot of people who were just interested in the financial aspect of it, which is depressing.
-- Moby

#Depressing #People #Financial

As people continue to do more and buy more over the Internet, continue to meet people over the Internet, connection speeds are going to get faster, and the Internet is just going to become an even more integral part of people's lives.
-- Moby

#People #Connections #Internet

At the risk of sounding pedestrian, I'll be completely honest: the first thing I do in the morning is check Google News, partially because it seems sort of random and unbiased and partially because I tend to stay in hotels that don't necessarily have the fastest Internet connections.
-- Moby

#Morning #Risk #Google

But on a utilitarian level, I realize that to try to accomplish the greatest good for the greatest number of people, sometimes we have to become salesmen for what we believe, and part of being a salesman is being effective.
-- Moby

#Believe #Numbers #People

Every single day the world seems like it is on the brink of falling apart. But then I look outside my window, and things look about the same as they did a week ago. It's almost a form of cognitive dissonance.
-- Moby

#Fall #Looks #World

I thought that my life would be spent working in a bookstore, teaching community college, and making music in my spare time that no one would be willing to listen to.
-- Moby

#Teaching #College #Community

Personally I find the democratic chaos of the Internet fascinating, and for the most part really benign.
-- Moby

#Chaos #Internet #Benign