Basically, the reason I'm vegan is because when I was about 16 or 17 years old, I began to understand that we don't need to contribute to the killing and exploitation of animals to feed our bodies correctly.

There's an inherent thing in me where, if things are going too smooth, I'll sabotage the hell out of them, just to make the music more of a sanctuary.

Reactive arthritis is something I've been dealing with for nearly a year.

Touring doesn't kill me and I can handle it.

We never considered ourselves to be a good band or anything, we just thought we were playing for fun and we wanted to play music that sounded like Black Sabbath or Soundgarden or the music we were into at that time.

It makes it hard to get over a certain period of your life when you are constantly revisiting it every night.

So I went and visited a doctor and he diagnosed me with reactive arthritis.

There are no big groupie fans or anything.

I have not really experienced any significant conflict with anyone in regard to my choice to be vegan, although going out to eat is hard sometimes.

None of us are really dumb and none of us are really smart. We're in the middle.

I get very anxious and am scared in crowds and things like that.

I have never had a social life, don't ever want one because it's boring. I'm just not very good with people, and you meet people every night who expect you to be this rock star with these developed social skills, which I don't have.

With our first two records we backed ourselves into a hole musically.

I start sweating and shaking and having panic attacks if I am not at home.

We were perceived as a post-grunge band.

We were really motivated to do something with this record overseas, even though I hate touring.

Kinda when I stopped eating was on our second album, just as it felt like everything was so out of control.

The touring for this album was definitely going to be the most intense touring we've done.

I wrote... Neon Ballroom in that time where I hated music, really everything about it, I hated it.

I am very scared of being outside my home for long periods of time.

I try to stay positive by focusing on how much I'll appreciate my health if I get better.

Though, since the first record, I've dramatically changed my expectations for our records.

Basically, the reason I'm vegan is because when I was about 16 or 17 years old, I began to understand that we don't need to contribute to the killing and exploitation of animals to feed our bodies correctly.

We met The Cult and were talking to them for a while. We went a few places with Offspring.

I know if I don't tour people will forget the record and you run a high risk of the record failing.

I'm lucky the arthritis happened at the time that it did because of the record.

I think I definitely got scared by the second or third time a doctor told me I was dying.

I am doing everything humanly possible to try and get well, but lately things have just kept getting worse.

I'm always active in trying to educate people when it comes to eating animal products, testing on animals, and the health benefits of being vegan, although I'm probably not the best person to be talking about the latter at the moment.

It just makes everything more pleasurable when you've got someone that emotionally is there to rely on.

I have a theory because I was being beaten up a lot by people outside of school, it was almost like if I could make myself sick enough they'd take sympathy on me.

I never really paid attention to sales until the second record.

When we first began and I was 14, my influences were the stuff that was in my parent's record collection like Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin.

There was three or four years of my life where I hated myself and you know, would have quite happily ended it.

I had to try and find a way to express happiness without sounding corny.

People don't understand sarcasm, like, they take everything too seriously. People need to lighten up and go ice skating.

Man has done a lot to make himself dangerous and animals get the worst of all of it. But then, man too is an animal.

Biology will relate every human gene to the genes of other animals and bacteria, to this great chain of being.

When I see professional clowns, mimes, or people who makes ballon animals, I think of their relatives and how disappointed they must be.

Animals often strike us as passionate machines.

My object will be, first, to show by what connections the history of the fossil bones of land animals is linked to the theory of the earth and why they have a particular importance in this respect.

Hence the same instant which killed the animals froze the country where they lived. This event was sudden, instantaneous, without any gradual development.

Towns are suffering from all these things, we should unite until we are all satisfied, man cannot be killing each other as if we were animals, as if we had no culture; that is a lack of culture.

Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.

The only way to save a rhinoceros is to save the environment in which it lives, because there's a mutual dependency between it and millions of other species of both animals and plants.

I've always been fascinated by the way that children and animals suffer stoically in a way that I don't think adults do.

Ever occur to you why some of us can be this much concerned with animals suffering? Because government is not. Why not? Animals don't vote.

Animals are reliable, many full of love, true in their affections, predictable in their actions, grateful and loyal. Difficult standards for people to live up to.

When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?