Quotes by Trent Reznor

I miss how a record label can help spread the word that you have something out.

Being in a band with my wife, I'm very aware of the multitude of ways that can go wrong. We're best friends and are interested in the same things, so it's natural to make music together.

When fame presented itself to me, I was not at a point in my life where I was equipped to deal with it.

Now that I have a thousand albums in my car all the time, I listen to more music. I was too lazy; I always had the same five discs in there. I'd never think to change it.

Today's political climate does not allow the luxury of apathy.

One of my biggest heroes and people I was fortunate enough to be around is David Bowie. I look at his career, and he always had the balls to break things that weren't broken, to step away from something and try something new, at risk of failing.

Being human is a lot more difficult than being on tour.

My doctor says, 'You've got one of the hardest ones to treat because it's not bipolar, it's not up and down, you're always just about a quart low in the mood department.

If you have something to say, then say it. Express yourself and break the rules.

Lots of people can have girlfriends. But I can throw around guitars onstage! That'll be my epitaph: 'He never had a girlfriend, but you should've seen him smash a Les Paul!'

Live interaction with a crowd is a cathartic, spiritual kind of exchange, and its intensified at a festival.

I'll be there for you, as long as it works for me. I play a game, its called insincerity.

It's kind of a miracle to think that a device in your pocket can play pretty much any song that the world has ever created.

It's easy to get lost in the shuffle, and just enticing people to hear the music for free doesn't mean that much when everyone else is essentially doing the same thing on MySpace, or wherever.

Tired faith all worn and thin, for all we could have done, and all that could have been.

When I'm writing music, I'm not playing a character. I'm not Alice Cooper or Gene Simmons or someone like that, who has acknowledged that they are writing music for a character.

I become irritated when I am being written off as aloof or stand-offish when I'm shy and don't know what to say.

Left to my own devices, in the face of the climate change deniers, the madness and the greed-based decision-making, and propaganda that's been floating around, it's hard not to become pessimistic.

When I look at people that I would like to feel have been a mentor or an inspiring kind of archetype of what I'd love to see my career eventually be mentioned as a footnote for in the same paragraph, it would be, like, Bowie.

I believe there's a God but I'm not too sure of his relevance.

There's something exciting and incredibly liberating for an artist to finish something Friday night and the world hears it Friday night instead of eight months later after marketing people and all those assholes get involved.

I think if there was an ISP tax of some sort, we can say to the consumer, 'All music is now available and able to be downloaded and put in your car and put in your iPod and put up your a -- if you want and it's $5 on your cable bill.'

My moral standing is lying down.

If I could start again, a million miles away, I would keep myself, I would find a way.

One step closer to the end of the world. The one-two combo of corporate greed and organised religion apparently proved to be too much for reason, sanity and compassion.

I think, fundamentally, music is something inherently people love and need and relate to, and a lot of what's out right now feels like McDonalds. It's quick-fix. You kind of have a stomachache afterwards.

I remember everything

What have I become?

My sweetest friend?

Everyone I know goes away in the end

You could have it all

My empire of dirt

I will let you down

I will make you hurt.

I think the whole aspect of social networking is vulgar and repulsive in a lot of ways.

His perfect kingdom of killing, suffering and pain Demands devotion, atrocities done in his name.

There's nothing like a stressful day.

To switch right into creativity usually takes a bit of time, and this came up right at that juncture where I thought, okay, here's an opportunity to work with somebody I really respect in a new medium.

The Grammys make me hate music, and certainly everyone in the ass-licking music industry.

After coming from a major label, I realized the entire business has been decimated, and you can't look to labels to try to figure it out because they don't even use the technology, and they're oblivious to how people consume music these days.

In 2010, aside from that niche of music that I have no interest in -- Black Eyed Peas territory, disposable pop stuff -- there's almost an incentive to go back to making music as adventurous and groundbreaking as you can, because nobody gets a big hit anymore.

I'm sure there is a group of people that assume Nine Inch Nails is just noise and chaos -- or whatever it might be dismissed as, and sometimes is.

I didn't want to be in a Pepsi commercial with R2-D2 sitting on my shoulder.

I tend to not listen to my own music when I'm not working on it. No real reason other than it's nice to get away from it.

Spotify -- I met those guys before they launched in America and was wildly excited about the idea. 'Wow, this is all the music in the world, for a flat fee.'

I lived a fairly average, anonymous small-town life till I got the idea to do Nine Inch Nails. Then I locked myself in a studio for a year, and then got off the tour bus two years after that, and I didn't know who I'd turned into.

The result of a public that has a very high consumption rate and turnover rate is people listen to more music but spend less time with individual bits of music. It's made me more likely to put things up quickly and treat it more like a magazine instead of a novel.

What I was concerned about when I wrote the 'Downward Spiral' record was being a self-centred destructive force. The point was tearing down everything in a search for something else.

People are always saying, 'You're really nice, I thought you were going to be a complete asshole.' I'm getting pretty fed up with it. I just want to say to them, 'Well I could always piss on your head.'

I wear this crown of thorns

Upon my liar's chair

Full of broken thoughts

I cannot repair

Beneath the stains of time

The feelings disappear

You are someone else

I am still right here

What have I become

My sweetest friend?

God is dead, and no one cares! If there is a hell I'll see you there!

It's one thing to sit back and say, 'Hey let's play a club, that will be great,' but then you get there and say, 'Hey wait, this is the dressing room? Where's my dressing room?'

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I don't think music should be free.

Anyone who's an executive at a record label does not understand what the Internet is, how it works, how people use it, how fans and consumers interact -- no idea. I'm surprised they know how to use e-mail.

I don't have a family. I'd like to have one. I just haven't somehow gotten around to it yet.

Today, if you do put out a record on a label, traditionally, most people are going to hear it via a leak that happens two weeks -- if not two months -- before it comes out. There's no real way around that.

You know, if nobody knows who you are, nobody's going to buy your record.

My input for the first 16, 17 years of my life was AM radio, FM radio -- pretty mainstream stuff. Rolling Stone was probably as edgy as it got.

I think it's just an awkward time right now to be a musician.

Schoolwork came easy to me. I learned to play piano effortlessly. I was coasting.

I thought my goal in life was to be in a successful band, and I had got that, but I was as miserable as I had ever been, and I couldn't understand why that would be.

If there used to be 100 people at a major working on a record, now there are 18, but they're the good ones. There's a lean, mean hunger.

I can still make a living with touring. And maybe you buy a t-shirt. And I would rather 10 million people get my record and listen to it for free than 500,000 that I coerced to pay $15 for it, you know?

When I return to the writing process after being away from it for a while, the first part of it always is being honest with myself: What am I into right now? Is it rock bands and guitars, is it noise, is it dance beats and electronics? Is it space, is it clutter?

I'd much rather be worrying about playing that note in tune, and picking out the best way to arrange the song, rather than thinking about pricing for the download. It's not art.

I need boundaries. In the modern studio there are a bunch of instruments around me, and I can simulate anything I can't play, so sometimes the palette feels too big.

When I'm on stage, the songs that we've chosen to play from the back catalog are things that still resonate with me, and matter to me. And the songs that I couldn't be a part of, we don't play anymore.

The idea of politics is just so uninteresting to me -- I've never paid much attention to it. I don't believe things can really change. It doesn't matter who's president. Nothing really gets resolved. I don't know. I guess that's not the right attitude to take.

My dad and I are best friends. He's pretty much responsible for the way I turned out. He would provide a little artistic inspiration here and there in the form of a guitar, stuff like that.

I'm very much aware of the dangers of becoming a cliche. Mr. Anger, someone who gets meaner, angrier on record.

I like the idea of subversively communicating with people... so that you make people see things in different ways.

Any time I sit down and write music, the first part of that is always centering myself and thinking about who I currently am.

I love David Fincher and I think he's a genius.

My life has two modes. One is sitting around writing and contemplating or building things. The other is execution mode. It takes a while to switch from one to the other.

The band Grizzly Bear, I think they're excellent. There's a beauty and a musicality there that I wish would have been in vogue in the late '80s, when I was forming bands.

When I was growing up, rock and roll helped give me my sense of identity, but I had to search for it.

Now U2's not my favorite band, but I do respect them, and in the same way I respect Bowie: They change without fear of change.

I do remember my first purchase: the Partridge Family's 'Greatest Hits.' I got it for $3.99 at a failed chain of pre-Wal-Mart-type stores called Jamesway. God, I'm old.

It probably wasn't until Nine Inch Nails played the first Lollapalooza that I actually went to a festival.

When I was growing up, the people who liked the Beatles, I didn't like, so I didn't pay attention to them.

I watch people, friends of mine, and see how they portray themselves online and I find interesting that it's kind of a hyper-real version of yourself, how you'd like to be seen, in a way.

'Yeezus,' I really love it. I think the sound of it is cool.

MTV can't do less for me, let's put it that way. I'm fine without them.

I don't have to save rock. I don't even like rock that much.

Musicians have always adopted Macs.

ITunes kind of feels like Sam Goody to me. I don't feel cool when I go there. I'm tired of seeing John Mayer's face pop up.

When I first played 'Wolfenstein 3D,' it blew my mind. It had a big impact on me.

Nine Inch Nails is like building an army to go conquer. We build it, then we play, and we have to play so much to validate building it, financially. It leads to getting burn-out because a tour that would be fun if it lasted three weeks has to last 15 weeks.

I think it's easy to make impenetrable music that nobody can get, and you can hide behind that sometimes.

I did not grow up in a cosmopolitan environment. I grew up in a little town in the middle of nowhere, pre-Internet, pre-college radio.

What I have appreciated about the 'Call of Duty' games is the scale of production. It's not an indie game. It's not trying to be an indie game. But I've genuinely been pretty consistently blown away by, wow, what an effort has gone into this.

I used to buy vinyl. Today, if you do put out a record on a label, traditionally, most people are going to hear it via a leak that happens two weeks -- if not two months -- before it comes out. There's no real way around that.

The reality is that people think it's okay to steal music.

I realized when I was 23 that I had never really tried anything.

I realized that I was afraid to really, really try something, 100%, because I had never reached true failure.

I foolishly thought that if I just 'made it' then everything would be okay. And everything wasn't okay.

Apparently, the image of our president is as offensive to MTV as it is to me.

If you can use a search engine, you can find any piece of music that's been recorded for free. I'm not saying that's right, but it's a fact, and I'm surprised that more people don't accept or acknowledge that and try to adapt in some way.