Quotes from Mike D

Denver and Boulder are good record-buying cities. I don't know why.

When you start rhyming, it's hard to find things that rhyme with Yauch, Horovitz and Diamond.

The amazing thing about music is that however many thousands of records I've got now, I know that there are still thousands more that I haven't even begun to discover.

L.A. is a town built upon segregated, individual fantasies.

Dub has been a big influence in terms of production. It's inspired so many people and so much music - in terms of music where mixing desk was the instrument. Central to that is the echo chamber, and I think there's a little bit of a romantic thing there.

For 'Paul's Boutique,' we had a lot more money and a lot more time. It was definitely more on our own terms.

We're downtown New Yorkers and had very close proximity to the events of September 11th. Like everybody on the island of Manhattan, we were impacted by it in so many ways in terms of what we saw, what we felt, what our daily experience became in the wake of it.

My parents were very, very good about not separating us as kids from their adult friends. So on any given night, we'd have, like, this kind of freak show - artists and art dealers coming over. And these are the people I feel like I learned from.

We are exercising our constitutional right to be fresh.

Wine is similar to music in that it's a purely experiential realm, and it's a purely subjective practice. That's sort of the funny thing about wine criticism or, for that matter, music criticism. At times, those are useful guides, but ultimately it's all about how you react to that music or wine.

I do really enjoy Jay McInerney's wine writing. He's a good writer. He brings his fiction-writing skillset. He's not afraid to put wine in kind of a racy context and speak very candidly about it.

I don't know - the idea of a specific wine paired with a specific piece of music seems a little far-fetched to me. But maybe I just need to be opened to it.

Wine needs to have a context in a social gathering to fulfill its historical place in this world.

Yauch was a gifted MC.

Hopefully everybody in the audience thinks, 'That's cool. I could do that.' I don't like the thought that they say, 'I saw the Beastie Boys last night, and they're mega-stars.' I'm a lot happier when the kids who come backstage or to the hotel try to give us tapes of what they've done instead of just getting an autograph.

Things change. I used to have a real resistance to it and hold on to things, but let things happen and go with it, and you will actually go through it, and it's a lot less stressful.

The bottom line with a lot of bands that funk is being applied to is that they don't really listen to funk and aren't versed in funk. Like, you know, Gordon Lightfoot.

If it's genuinely new, when people are hearing it, they're not really gonna be comfortable because they haven't heard it a thousand times before.

When you get to a point where you're not beholden to a record company, then it's up to you to say, 'OK, enough knob-turning. We're done.'

Mr. Philippe Zdar is a little bit like the uncle of the whole Daft Punk-Phoenix-Air thing in Paris and known for being in the group Cassius. It was interesting working with Philippe.

I don't know if it's just me getting older or if it's a reflection of times changing, but it just seems to me like among most of my friends and peers, there's a lot more time being spent at home than out.

London cabs always dis me. I purposefully give them a good tip because I'm trying to straighten up the image where they don't want to pick up some shady-looking, bummy kid like myself. I'm trying to teach them that if you pick up the bummy-looking kid, you still get tipped, man. But they still jerk me around.

Obviously, there are moments that you look back at and cringe - things in the past involving violence or disrespect to women or disrespect to other people that are so far away from what I want to put out there now. But it's actually a privilege to be able to change and be making records that reflect that change.

We're banned from a whole lot of hotels, and we're running out of hotels we can stay in.