Quotes from Ron Mael

The one factor that determines how people get along best is a shared sense of humor.

We want to challenge even the people who are familiar with what we've done in the past.

Over 10,000 years of human history, I suppose it's been proven that there is an appeal to the idea of having a family. Just not for me.

Something that means a lot to me is when people from other fields are inspired by what we're doing.

I like music where it can be taken in at many levels, as far as the emotions behind it. Somebody like Miles Davis - there's such a wide range of feelings within even one note. Those kinds of things really resonate for me. It's kind of inspiring in a human kind of way.

It's always hard to analyze the effect of your nationality and your surroundings or anything like that. I think in some ways we failed to become the textbook British band, but we kind of turned into something else - and it wasn't even intentional.

Well, I haven't been a delivery boy for quite a long time.

You have to have an enemy to react against. We think it's important to have a sort of us-versus-them situation.

We don't set out to be polarizing. But just by the nature of what we've always done, it seems to have a certain polarizing aspect, so it kind of seemed almost natural that a film that we would be involved in would have that same kind of reaction.

I'm so happy that the first time Russell and I saw 'Annette' with an audience was at the Cannes Film Festival, and even more pleased that it got such a strong positive reaction because that's pretty much the top honor when it comes to screening a film.

I don't think it's especially praiseworthy that even in those periods when things around us were kind of dire, we were working on the music. There isn't an alternative; that kind of work ethic is all that there is.

When we started it was only for the fun. We never had any thoughts of legacy or anything like that. It was a thrill to have one album released. Music was only a fun thing to do for us, I was studying graphic design and Russell film - but it gradually became something more than the other stuff.

When we were growing up, Russell and I were into The Who, The Move, The Kinks, early Pink Floyd, really good tight pop bands.

The first time we wrote a full-blown movie musical was our adaptation of 'Mai, the Psychic Girl' for Tim Burton, which didn't get made. We learned pretty early on from that experience how to incorporate dialogue into a musical setting that feels naturalistic while still feeling stylized.

So much respect is given to artists who are doing things that seems sort of timeless and legitimate. That kind of legitimacy and timelessness is to me sort of the opposite of what pop music should be.

The impression that you give to other people in an external way changes over time so it becomes harder to convince people musically that you are relevant, but we just put on blinders and ignore all those things and do what we think is interesting.

Obviously we have a sensibility that's aligned to everything we've done but we try not within certain ways to repeat ourselves.

People have told me repeatedly of how scared they were of seeing me on television.

We've really learned to ignore past failures.

To have a Beatle doing an impression of you, I almost retired at that moment.

In the U.S., many people thought what we were doing was frothy, silly, just not serious enough. The kind of pop role-playing we were aiming for was out of place in American pop culture.

You want to seek out the things that inspire you to keep doing what you're doing.

Yeah, 'Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth.' I almost hate to admit what it was originally intended to be, but it's been taken on as being an early example of a song that is championing saving the environment. The song was actually written to be, 'Watch out for mother nature; it can be very devastating.'

There has been times when we've had really great commercial success in various parts of the world. And the sensibility is something that's kind of been maintained, but I'm not sure how much our musical environment has entered into it, or if we were more or less trapped into doing what we're doing by the nature of our personalities.