Mike Patton People Quotations

Let's just say we're closer musical friends now. A lot of these people are strangers to me. They were out of sight but very much in mind.

I guess I'm getting to the age where a lot of other people my age have real jobs, and when they're hard-up they refer to an old-timer like me.

I learned what I could do with my voice on stages and because of the people that I was around. It wasn't me sitting in a room by myself. I didn't know what I was doing. I was figuring it out on the fly.

I'm not a poet. I'm not up onstage to get something off my chest. I'm making musical statements, or, most of the time, musical questions for people to figure out, and I'm not going to get in the way of that.

I think that too many people think too much about my lyrics. I am more a person who works with the sound of a word than with its meaning. Often I just choose the words because of the rhythm not because of the meaning.