Michael Stipe

“When we first started, we were a band from Athens and that was so off the map.”

“We toured that record for a year, which turned out to be the culmination of ten years of being constantly on the road. We were sick to death of touring.”

“When you meet a stranger, look at his shoes. Keep your money in your shoes.”

“My iPod that was programmed by Peter Buck. It has 7,000 songs hand-picked for me by him.”

“I'm tired of being this solemn poet of the masses, the enigma shrouded in a mystery.”

“I think there were early critics who wanted us to change the world because the Sex Pistols failed.”

“Peter was sick of being a pop star, the guitar god, and so he decided to teach himself other instruments. Among the instruments that he picked up was the mandolin.”

“So, we just kind of created our own thing and that's part of the beauty of Athens: is that it's so off the map and there's no way you could ever be the East Village or an L.A. scene or a San Francisco scene, that it just became its own thing.”

“I really wanted to be on Six Feet Under as a corpse. That would be hysterical.”

“I'm not homosexual, I'm not hetrosexual, I'm just sexual.”

“If you disagree with me, fine! Because that's the great thing about America, we can disagree!”

“But I think the one thing that I can say about us is that we're very consistent about certain things and part of that is our desire to do the very best work that we can and not rest on our laurels, or not allow formula to come into what we do.”

“We're absolutely American and distinctly so, I think. That's part of what people respond to outside of this country, part of the reason that we're such a huge band outside of the U.S., where we're not so popular now as we were 10 or 12 years ago.”