Quotes from Win Butler

It's a lot easier to sabotage your career than to have a career to sabotage.

The work that Partners in Health do in Haiti benefits the whole world.

The music in Haiti is all tied up in voodoo and African rhythm, and so there's this funny thing: go to a voodoo ceremony, and then go to a Catholic church and tell me which music you liked better, to which one the music is more integral.

I think there's some pretty amazing language in the Bible.

The Flaming Lips have been on Warner Bros. forever, and certainly everything I heard growing up was on a major label in some way, from the Cure to Radiohead to Bjork.

The idea of dancing to bad house music is something I could never get behind.

Music is made by individuals. Some artists will be very politically overt in their songs, some will be more subtle. You have to be true to yourself, true to your nature.

Actual patriotism has to do with loving a place enough to try and improve it.

The cliched rock life never seemed that cool to me.

Everyone has their own talents. It's up to the individual to see what you can actually do.

I'm not a good hipster - if I let my moustache grow for weeks, it just looks like I have dirt on my face. I'll never have a glorious handlebar moustache.

It seems like the record industry made so much crazy money in the 1960s that everyone wanted to get in on it. Now it's just become very corporate. So all of these people who despise music end up being in charge.

My favorite English teacher in high school showed me 'Brazil' when I was 15, and it blew my mind. It's one of those movies that's revealed itself in different ways as I've gone back to it over the years.

There are so many bands that I'm kind of aware of through media about them, and it ends up filtering my experience of the actual music.

I'm not practising, I don't go to church, but what I got from it was a sense of belonging to something bigger. What I really miss is being forced to be in a community with people that aren't the same as you. Then, you really have to work through the ways that you're different.

If you think about it, if you've ever been to a Catholic service, it's practically a laser light show. It's very dramatic, very theatrical. The outfits they wear, it's all designed to be impressive.

Being in a rock band, I feel a certain responsibility to have a weird haircut. I mean, who else gets to do that?

The film Black Orpheus is one of my favorite films of all time, which is set in Carnival in Brazil.

We're exposed to ideas everywhere. The world is full of ideas. I think that television is a pretty powerful medium in that regard.

I had a somewhat religious upbringing. Not strict, but it was there, and I'm kind of thankful for that. If you grow up just watching MTV, that's its own form of religion, and it's not even based on happiness or communal responsibility. I mean, try to construct a worldview out of that.

Whenever you're talking about meaning, basically... I think a lot of the human experience has to do with trying to understand what things mean, and there's not really any tools to do that unless you're thinking about it in a more spiritual or philosophical realm.

I love my iPhone it's great to have a camera around all the time.

I was really sick of bands just ignoring the audience as a posture in rock music. And I think we fed off each other in terms of trying to engage the audience, not in a hammy way, but actually trying to be aware of the space that you are playing in and trying to connect in some way through the music.

Usually, I think you have most of your musical influences locked down by the time you're 16.