There's nothing I'd say that keeps me awake at night, but I think that - when you're working with a group of people that are so beyond talented - that, every day, you wake up going, 'All right, I gotta fight to stay at the same level as these people.' That's what makes it fun.
As far as guitar picking, if I make the same mistakes at the same time every day, people will start calling it a style.
Most people, including myself, keep repeating the same mistakes.
I'm gonna reveal something to you that's going to come as a shock: If you're a stupid young man, you're usually a stupid old man. Most people, including myself, keep repeating the same mistakes.
Specialists are people who always repeat the same mistakes.
I want to create a TV show that people will watch and say, 'Hey, I have a favorite character,' or 'Hey, that person reminds me of myself,' or 'Hey, I've made some of those same mistakes, or those are some of the things I've dealt with.'
The environment on the sets of the movies I make, it's usually all friends and people that know each other, because no one's getting rich or making money, so it's always about, hopefully, that everyone's on the same page.
Rick Rubin was able to do things that Dave Fortman could never do. I'm not trying to take anything away from Dave Fortman as a producer. He's extremely talented. He wasn't able to get nine people together on the same page and, to me, that's the most important thing in making a Slipknot record.
If two people believe in the same story, they might be thousands of miles apart and total strangers, but they still have a sense they can trust each other.
I'm just one of those people who can always tell the same story twice, forgetting that I've told it already.
You don't want to write the same story again, but people are like 'We want the same story but different.' Well, how do you do that?
I love to write. I used to be a math teacher. And I like the idea that other people could write about the same subjects, but no one would write it just the way I do. It's very individual: a child could write the same story as somebody else, but it wouldn't come out the same.
Drama is more universal. We all cry about the same stuff. But comedy is very specific: It depends on where you were born, how old you are, your social-economic status. It's very complicated to make people laugh.
We were like a white family from the 1920s or something. My parents had this bizarre, different way of looking at things from the people that surrounded us. I went to an all-Mexican grade school and an all-black high school, and not many people in those places liked the same stuff as me.
I want people to know that it's OK to have feelings; it's OK to be vulnerable. That no matter where they live around the world, teenagers all go through the same things.
Although my parents both liked her, they just didn't approve of a same-sex relationship. Nowadays, people say that you must let children be what they are, but when I was growing up, the parents defined the child - and my parents had a definite vision of how they wanted me to be.
I wouldn't say I'm against same-sex marriage. I believe in freedom and equality for all people. I believe that when it comes to gay marriage, that's a political and legal issue that has to be dealt with in that arena. I have privately held beliefs, but when it comes to that, it's properly placed in the political and legal arena.
I think if I wanted to get to a point where I could actually grow in my music, I had to almost step away from sampling so much and start making the kind of music that people wanted to sample.
I'll flip samples where one's a completely dark song and the next one is a complete sexual song. People think my whole thing is a dark thing, but I don't.
To go back and read Swift and Defoe and Samuel Johnson and Smollett and Pope - all those people we had to read in college English courses - to read them now is to have one of the infinite pleasures in life.
