Mike Shinoda Quotations

I like sneakers. I guess I could call myself a collector.

Go find something that you haven't done before. Don't do the same thing over and over again.

As a creative person you just get an idea in your head, and sometimes you just can't shake it off.

I liked the piano. I always liked playing. I just hated homework.

Who can't relate to the idea of leaving one chapter behind and moving on to the next?

When I was in high school, if my favorite band got too popular, I'd watch carefully.

My dad remembers being in school with my uncle, and the teacher would say outright to the class that the Japanese were second-class citizens and shouldn't be trusted.

A decade is a long time to be doing anything, much less to be with the same guys, chasing after the same goals.

When we started the band, it was because we were waiting for a sound that never happened. We got tired of waiting, and we decided to just do it ourselves.

Usually I spend my holidays with my family.

I know at one point I had bright red hair and I had bracelets from my wrist up to my elbow and I was wearing size 50 pants. I wouldn't wear that today, but I'm not embarrassed about wearing it back then any more.

I spent ten years playing classical piano, and that was what led to keyboards and eventually to production and to Linkin Park.

We learned pretty early on in this band that you can't have snobbery in music.

I'd rather get up early and go out and do something than stay up late and screw up my body.

We have people in the band who don't drink or do drugs... some of us like to go sightseeing.

I remember being a little kid sitting in the living room with my brother and some friends from around the neighborhood, and I would sit at the piano and as they were running around the room doing different things and being silly, acting out, I would actually play the score for it - the music that went along with it.

I've been really excited about some new cutting edge electronic music and technology.

Little pieces of advice like that can provide us with months' worth of entertainment.

I'm excited to doing more scoring work in the future.

I grew up painting and playing piano so when I was a little kid I thought I was going to be an artist or a painter but my mom had me taking piano lessons for about 10-12 years as a young kid.

I feel really lucky to be in a band where the guys, for all the opportunities to do things that potentially would be good for them but detrimental to the group, that everybody stayed loyal to the whole.

The thing is, there are so many different ways to make music these days with virtual instruments, software applications, physical instruments, and computer programs.

Most of the musicians that I know almost to the man everybody uses Apple computers. They've thought of the steps that you're going to think of when you're trying to create your thing. And that's where the tools get invented to make better art.

Since this record is coming out on Machine Shop, our label, I could pick anyone I wanted to work on it, so I chose Brad as our A&R guy, which is hilarious because ... Brad's not a label guy, he's my friend, ... I've known him since I was like 13 years old and he can come in and say, 'Hey, that song, it's good, but trash this part of it and do this differently,' and I will actually listen to him.

I would have never done this record if I didn't have the blessing of the rest of the guys, ... We're not, like, on hiatus. We're working. We're very serious about our records, and I know the guys are at home right now writing. Hopefully we are looking at next year for a record.

I'd call it an organic hip-hop style, musically. Back in the late '80s and early '90s, people sampled a lot, and because of that these records had a feel. They weren't recorded in a computer with a click track. . . . When I was approaching this record, what I wanted to do was try and get back to that, but I write music, I play music, so I wanted to write every note, record every note and play every note, and get that kind of hand-played feel.

He did a very different video for me, ... It's really clean and there's these crazy light effects. As you're shooting the video, it's like there's nothing there, so you had to imagine what's going to happen. I was very critical. I had to apologize many times for making him go back and change things a lot, but he was a good sport about it and we basically spent an extra two weeks on it. Basically from my face to the album artwork to crazy shapes that fly through the air, they're all transparent, three-dimensional light shapes that flow through the air and carry the song.

It's a hip-hop record, but it's a musician-based hip-hop record,

The album comes out November 22 one-one two-two, so it's easy to remember.

It's called Fort Minor instead of my name because there is a bunch of other people involved in the project. But I only wanted to work with family and friends; people who I feel are really close to me and we see eye-to-eye. Besides that, Fort has a militant meaning and Minor in music is a smaller, darker, sadder note, so the name is a reflection of the music.

In high school I was making beats for my friends and for myself and rapping over them.

But I obviously wouldn't have done the album unless the other guys gave their blessing.

I find that the things that really, you know, get us fired up, tend to be things that, for example, things that you talk about tonight, what we see in the news.

I was a producer and rapper before Linkin Park. Once the band took off, it was the center of my focus. A couple of years ago, I started missing doing straight-up hip hop, and that's when Fort Minor began.

For me, I feel like, if the right movie comes along, I'd do it again. It's not about the budget. It's about whether it's something that I'm excited to work on.

If I weren't making music, I'd be the kid who writes into the magazines and says, "why don't you guys ever cover anything that's different? Hip hop is so much of the same thing over and over again." I love hip hop, so I wanted to make an album from that standpoint, 'cause that's who I am.

global warming. every day i leave my house and think, "was it this hot last year?" the heat this summer here in LA and in most of the US has been unbearable. i can't remember another time when it was 105 degrees fahrenheit out here (40.5 celsius), and that's the kind of weather we've been having pretty much every day.

Right now, when it comes to making an album, we really want to give our fans just Linkin Park. We don't want to water it down with anything else or confuse it with anything else. Meteora is just us and that's where our focus has been. So hopefully the fans can enjoy that.

I have a toothbrush, my toothbrush is sexy

My parents still treat Christmas like I'm thirteen years old.

The casual listener won't be around forever.

Id rather get up early and go out and do something than stay up late and screw up my body.

I loved Transformers when I was a kid.

I'm going to sprout wings out of my ass one day and fly around the world.

I really enjoy it -- it's like a videogame on wheels. The GPS touch screen is one of the most entertaining things I've ever seen in a car. I still have a Range Rover that I don't drive much anymore, because I started feeling bad about it.

I am Opposite of weak Opposite of slack Synonym of heat Synonym of crack Closest to the peak Far from a punk Y'all ought to stop talking And start trying to catch up

I usually like to make really dramatic songs that are dynamic from part to part - a lot of jumping from really quiet to really loud.

This is ten percent luck, Twenty percent skill, Fifteen percent power of will, Five percent pleasure, Fifty percent pain, and a hundred percent reason to remember the name

Dream big, work hard and don't be an asshole!

You definitely pick stuff up when you go back and listen to older material.

The Fort Minor record is all about getting back to basics in Hip-Hop, both sonically and for me personally. And working with Jay-Z again has been phenomenal. We can't wait for people to hear the final product.