Hansen: "As society changes, as politics change, as people change, certain songs still seem to resonate."

Hansen: "I didn't want to be on a major label. I wanted all the attention and the noise to go away because I wanted to be something a little bit more substantial."

Hansen: "I didn't want to do something typical."

Hansen: "I have heard some stuff that might be influenced by my records, but it's usually pretty wacky and off-the-wall, which is kind of annoying, to be frank."

Hansen: "Anything goes. You always find interesting things that way."

Hansen: "To me, 'rock star' conjures up something like a mystic: someone who sees himself as above other people, someone who has the key to the secret that people want to know."

Hansen: "Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mother's face, her aspect and her attitude."

Hansen: "Being able to take musical ideas through every iteration is attractive to me. Granted, not everyone's going to want to listen to that, but it should exist."

Hansen: "I think you have to keep a childlike quality to play music or make a record."

Hansen: "Studying music in a conservatory would be stifling for me, although I respect people who can do it. And by no means am I an expert at notating music or music theory - that's not really my world."

Hansen: "There's more things that I'd like to do. You know, each song is a little bit of a puzzle. I see most of them as just failed attempts."

Hansen: "In recording, you're trying to make something work sonically - getting the right inflection on the right guitar sound - and maybe a part that would be musically great doesn't sound as cool. On paper, though, it's all stripped back. The musical idea is the one that wins."

Hansen: "It's really hard for me to commit, one way or the other. I was just always creating and seeing what came out."

Hansen: "I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere."

Hansen: "I think trying to be offbeat is the most boring thing possible."

Hansen: "Sometimes things in life take a few years to digest, and they find their way into the work later on. Sometimes I'm writing about things from eight years ago-they just took a long time to distill and come out in the appropriate way."

Hansen: "I didn't go to high school. I never felt connected to people my age."

Hansen: "Usually, the music inspires the lyrics. The lyrics just sort of fall off like a bunch of crumbs from the melody. That's all I want them to be - crumbs. I don't want to work any kind of fabricated message."

Hansen: "I think my whole generation's mission is to kill the cliche."

Hansen: "There are a lot of people who really abused sampling and gave it a bad name, by just taking people's entire hit songs and rapping over them. It gave publishers license to get a little greedy."

Hansen: "I'm just taking one step at a time. I could zigzag one way, but it's not usually on purpose."

Hansen: "I enjoy the collaboration. I always envied people in bands who got to have that interaction. I've done so many albums where I've been in the studio for 14 hours a day for six months just trying to come up with things on my own. It's a nice change helping other people with their music and not being all about what I'm trying to do myself."

Hansen: "I've personally reached the point where the sound of MP3s are so uncompelling, because so much is lost in translation."

Hansen: "In Japan, you get on the bullet train or the airplane, and I loved the little speeches the stewardesses would do. They even do little speeches before you play gigs."

Hansen: "Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars."

Hansen: "Tonight the city is full of morgues, and all the toilets are overflowing. There's shopping malls coming out of the walls, as we walk out among the manure. That's why I pay no mind."

Hansen: "In the studio, I'm always throwing people on different instruments."

Hansen: "The cliche of what a rock star is - there's something elitist about it. I never related to that. I'm an entertainer. I think of it as, you're performing for people. It's not a self-glorification thing."

Hansen: "No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist."

Hansen: "The repercussions of what you put out and what people gravitate to in your music never registered at all. I never had that thing that maybe other bands have - a specific idea of what they are and what their sound is."

Hansen: "I've never been able to relate to apathy. I've always been doing stuff, been in action, making music or working just to get by."