"We're going to try and maintain a degree of professionalism here tonight, but then again they can go f**k that!" ====== "I feel gim-dandy tonight, someone must have put a happy paw in my morning orange juice." ====== "That's just the way I sound, I really can't control it." ====== "Hot as Dick." ====== "...the most obvious song I've ever written, but not one person, not one, has worked out what in hell it's about." - commenting on the song "Disturbance @ the Heron House." ====== Or the famous ... "Here's another song!" ====== "That song was a cartoon and it was meant to be but I don't really want to re-create it live, ya know." - on the song "Shiny Happy People." ====== "R.E.M. is a reason to exist." ====== "Love songs, um, the're something that I've avoided writing about for the entire history of REM because, I just think that the're so common, there are so many love songs, the're so poorly written, so of course the one biggest challenge as a lyrisist that I could bring out of myself would be to write a body of love songs that were intelligent. ====== "I take part in karaoke whenever the mood takes me. I can sing Jimmy Webb songs like a bitch!" ====== "Suffice to say I was getting laid and doing a lot of traveling around, sleeping on floors - it was great fun." ====== "The 15 minutes after I come off (stage), I'm incapable of having any kind of normal transaction with anyone. It doesn't matter who it is; my adrenal level is so high, I need that decompression. The car windows down is just because I'm sweating so hard. It's like a dog with his head out the window."

SPECIAL QUOTE FROM ROLLING STONE MAGAZINE: Mike Mills on the day Lennon was shot: "I was at the 40 Watt Club in Athens. It felt like getting kicked in the head. I had to sit down. The main thing I remember is that my friend Laurie went outside and wailed for an hour, screaming and sobbing. It was horrible. I just saw a look back at the week he and Yoko co-hosted The Mike Douglas Show. He had Jerry Rubin and George Carlin, and he put them into suburban American homes. He went a long way toward raising the American consciousness." ====== "You can listen to R.E.M. and wash dishes or you can put your headphones on and pay close attention; either way it works." ====== "Now I'm home. And loving it." ====== "[it] very definitely is going to require a few listens ... I don't know what people will make of this album." - on the "Out of Time" album. ====== "To me, R.E.M. is a marriage, I guess."

"I am grateful to the court, to the jury and my lawyers, and to my family, friends and supporters who have stood with me throughout this experience." "I am obviously relieved to be finished here, and I look forward to returning my attention to my family, my band and my music." - - After his long 2002 trial ended. ====== "I don't particularly like having my music given away and someone saying, 'It's not worth anything, but I'll be a billionaire because of it.' There's a good case that they were defrauding people of their copyrights." ====== "It was a nightmare, I couldn't sleep, I was nervous and I went for a walk about two blocks from the hotel and I came around the corner and there were these two monstrous breasts painted the right color with nipples and everything. I couldn't believe it!" ====== "I'm not like an anal collector, but I have thousands of records." ====== "We did go to Lester Bangs' birthday party, and we did eat jelly beans and cheesecake." ====== "To me R.E.M. is a river." ====== "So we waited a year and learned a bit more about writing slower things, stuff like 'Pilgrimage', that if you tried out in a bar, everybody goes to the bathroom. We had to take time out to experiment." ====== "I always hated that song, 'Wendell Gee'. I never really did it right. I thought it was too sappy. But I've got friends who really love it."