Cedric Bixler-Zavala

“Rock bands are not exactly magnets of functional people.”

“The story of my life is the Chicano experience personified.”

“It's inspiring to see Black Flag looking like Vietnamese farmers with big beards and those kind of Vietnamese farming hats showing up at a Mohawk-mania club in England and being spat at because they don't sound or look like Exploited; they sound more like Black Sabbath than Black Flag. I love that.”

“Most people like to backpack through Europe; I think the States is big enough for you to have an adventure in.”

“The 20-year-old version of me had all this energy, and wanted to be obnoxious with his art and wanted to communicate even though he didn't know what he wanted to communicate.”

“I gravitated towards Jim Ward, because I knew he was totally into the work aspect of being in a band.”

“If I speak my version of Spanish in Spain, they laugh. Same with Mexico. It's an alien world to me.”

“I wanted to be Paul Stanley or Gene Simmons.”

“Paranoia can be such a powerful hallucinogen if you're not careful - but it's great to kind of recognize it as that.”

“When you're just a breath away from North Korea, it boggles your mind that that exists, or that something like the Khmer Rouge ever existed. You wonder how we allow that to happen as human beings; how we allow the human condition to get so depraved and desperate.”

“You want to embrace what the idea of pop music is. Not necessarily the stereotype of pop music; there was a time when you'd say 'pop music' and conjure up images of the Sweet, or Marc Bolan. That, to me, can be avant-garde still.”

“I want to be known as someone who grew up a little.”

“I'm a huge Tchad Blake fan.”

“Our music would probably be a really dark ocean, so you may not know where you are. It's not so literal. It's like a David Lynch movie.”

“Sometimes 'Frances' can be about finding the missing piece, trying to look for biological family as opposed to maybe realizing your family is whoever is around you at the time.”

“I've come to realize that at the end of the day, it's only you yourself that creativity comes from.”

“All I can do is move forward with my music and just be happy that Mars Volta ever happened at all.”

“I constantly ask why one of my kids has the tantrums that he does, and it's not because he sees videos of me acting like that onstage but because we're bound by blood.”

“You don't understand what you're angry about as a young man. You have those young man blues.”

“It's hard to turn my internal dialogue off from that character I become.”